Big Picture
Ashlee & Vincent Take NY Plus, Nicole Kidman hangs out with her family and Bradley Cooper is a grizzly guy. The latest pics!
MORE PHOTOS +Most Commented
- TV's Top Couples Tournament: Vote in the Final Round! (2036)
- TV's Top Couples Tournament: This Round Is Closed, Please Stand By (974)
- TV's Top Couples Tournament: This Round Is Closed, Please Stand By (695)
- Afternoon Mail! Are Gleeks Having More Sex Than Vamps? (586)
- TV's Top Couple Tournament: And the Winner Is... (498)
- Whitney Houston Dead at 48 (394)
- Beyoncé and Jay-Z Share First Photos of Baby Blue Ivy! (391)
- New Ask Ted Video! Should Kristen Stewart Play Elizabeth Taylor? (300)
- Morning Mail! Is Lea Michele Ready to Walk Like an Egyptian? (286)
- Twilight Director Talks Kristen Stewart and Ex Michael Angarano: "They Were Such a Great Couple" (261)
Top 10 Stories
- Did Sony Try to Cash In on Whitney Houston's Death? Label Apologizes for Pricing "Mistake"
- Whitney Houston Death Probe: Doctors, Medical Records Sought in Investigation
- So True? So False? Did Billy Bob Thornton Use Bizzarro Relationship With Angelina Jolie as Basis for New Movie?!
- Sienna Miller Shows Off Baby Bump at Fashion Week Fête
- Teen Mom 2 Finale Recap: Jenelle Rehabs, Leah Divorces, Kailyn Gets Dumped and Chelsea... Sigh
- Playmate Claire Sinclair Describes Scene of Alleged Domestic Dispute With Marston Hefner
- Glee-Dux: Guess Who's Back?! V-Day Episode Delivers Romance, Smooches and Shockers!
- Blake Lively Gets Restraining Order Against Man Who Wanted to "Guide" Her
- 19 Kids and Counting Alleged Extortion Plot: Singer Laughs Off "Intimate Photos"
- Rumer Willis' Hollywood Hills Home Burglarized
Fashion Police
Angelina: Going Grey! Plus, Christina Hendricks, Vanessa Hudgens, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Michelle Williams and Kristen Wiig. Rate the highs and lows!
MORE PHOTOS +
Our Partners
UPDATE!
No Retreat in Vince Vaughn!
Universal Pictures
Vince Vaughn was money. Paranormal Activity was phenomenal.
Vaughn's Couples Retreat banked the year's biggest opening for a romantic comedy, with a much bigger than expected $35.3 million, No. 1 Friday-Sunday debut.
Paranormal Activity, meanwhile, packed its theaters, rising all the way to fifth place with a scary-good take of $7.1 million, a mere 645 times the horror flick's micro-budget.
Here's a rundown of more results from a weekend that was great for Hollywood—but a disaster for yet another High School Musical alum:
• Going into the weekend, conventional wisdom said Couples Retreat would gross in the $20 millions, maybe top out at $30 million. It ended up opening bigger than Vaughn's last hit, Four Christmases, and bigger than any of his comedies, save The Break-Up.
• Couples Retreat succeeded with the help of 3,000 screens and a reputed $70 million budget, the better to capture life at an exotic vacation resort. Paranormal Activity succeeded on the "strength" of 159 theaters and a $11,000 budget, the better (or lower) to invite comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.
• This was Paranormal Activity's third weekend in release, but its first to see the light of day, literally. Previously, the movie played at midnight times only. To date, the flick has grossed $8.3 million.
• Corbin Bleu, HSM classmates Ashley Tisdale (Aliens in the Attic) and Vanessa Hudgens (Bandslam) feel your pain. Bleu's motocross movie Free Style averaged only $405 at each of its lonely locations, for a $105,705 "gross." Or, to put another perspective on it, Free Style played at 100 more theaters than Paranormal Activity—and made $7 million less.
• Zombieland's fall to No. 2 wasn't very far. Last weekend's champ stayed strong with another $15 million. The $23.6 million zombie comedy has now taken in $47.8 million.
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (third place, $12 million; $96.3 million overall) continues to confound. Considering its $100 million budget, the CGI family film arguably hasn't had a great weekend. Then again, it definitely hasn't had a bad weekend, either.
• Drew Barrymore's Whip It (eighth place, $2.8 million; $8.8 million overall) has now pretty much had two not-good weekends.
• Two star's anti-star movies dropped out of the Top 10: Matt Damon's The Informant! ($2.2 million; $29.9 million overall) and Jennifer Aniston's Love Happens ($1.4 million; $21.2 million overall). The takes look low, but then so did the movies' respective budgets.
• It girl Carey Mulligan fed the buzz machine with a buzzworthy debut for the coming-of-age 1960s drama An Education ($162,381 at four theaters), which was the biggest little movie of the weekend after Paranormal Activity.
• Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair ($1 million at 186 theaters) had a good debut, lawsuit challenge or no.
Here's a look at the weekend's top-grossing films based on Friday-Sunday estimates as compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
- Couples Retreat, $35.3 million
- Zombieland, $15 million
- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, $12 million
- Toy Story/Toy Story 2, $7.7 million
- Paranormal Activity, $7.1 million
- Surrogates, $4.1 million
- The Invention of Lying, $3.4 million
- Whip It, $2.8 million
- Capitalism: A Love Story, $2.7 million
- Fame, $2.6 million
(Originally published Oct. 11, 2009, at 9:29 a.m. PT)
________
Check out our hot-buttered movie reviews to see what's out there—and what's good.
6 Comments
-
Show the next 1 - 0 of 6 comments
Now loading...