"Phone Booth" Dials Up Win

Phone Booth rang up $15 million as the new number-one movie.

After several weeks dominated by comedies, audiences apparently were ready for a good fright--or maybe just a glimpse of hot wild Irish boyo Colin Farrell.

The R-rated Fox release--in which Kiefer Sutherland's sniper reaches out and touches Farrell's philandering PR man, trapping him in a midtown Manhattan phone booth--headed up a trio of new major releases. Their arrival pushed last weekend's leading laughers, Head of State and Bringing Down the House, down to fourth and fifth place on the top-10 list, with $8.6 million and $8.3 million, respectively.

Phone Booth, whose release was delayed following last year's Washington, D.C., sniper attacks, marks the third straight Farrell film to debut on top of the box office. In February, The Recruit, the CIA drama in which he starred alongside Al Pacino, and Daredevil, in which he played the scene-stealing villain Bullseye opposite Ben Affleck's comic-book hero, both registered as top-grossing flicks.

Debuting in the second slot was What a Girl Wants, starring Amanda Bynes as an all-American girl who crashes the British social season in order to connect with her upper-crust dad (Colin Firth). The PG Warners romantic comedy fable about this reluctant debutante earned $11.4 million by appealing to its target demo of young women and girls.

In third place came A Man Apart, the latest Vin Diesel shoot 'em up. (This time he plays a special agent looking to exact revenge by busting a drug cartel.) While Man blasted into third place with $11 million, the R-rated New Line thriller, made before the Diesel-powered XXX scored big, cleaned up a slightly higher per-screen average--$4,481 at 2,459 sites--than What a Girl Wants' $3,858 from 2,964 sites.

Phone Booth averaged $6,054 at 2,481 screens, clearly top of the wide releases. But the weekend's highest per-screen average was earned by Nick Nolte's limited-release caper flick The Good Thief. At just nine sites, the R-rated Fox Searchlight release, a remake of the French noir Bob Le Flambeur, averaged $14,620 for $131,580.

Also scoring in limited release was the Japanese animé Cowboy Bebop, which opened on 19 screens and averaged $12,338 per for a weekend tally of $234,000.

Dysfunktional Family, Miramax's R-rated, no-expletive-deleted lensing of comedian Eddie Griffin's stage show, was dismal in comparison, averaging just $1,794 at 602 sites for a $1.1 million gross.

Another art-house release with limited appeal: Focus Features' The Guys, a movie version of the 9-11-themed off-Broadway play starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia. Playing at 15 sites, the film about a grieving fire captain coping with the loss of eight men averaged $1,071 for a three-day gross of just $16,068.

Among the holdovers, the only movie to register a gain was Bend It Like Beckham. The British import about soccer-crazy girls added 71 sites; now playing at 117 locations, it averaged $10,000 for $1.17 million gross. That was a 79 percent kick-up in its fourth week of release to bring its current overall tally to $2.6 million.

But overall business continued on the down slope. Studio executives tend to blame the war, Industry analysts tend to blame the quality of the movies. According to final studio figures released Monday, the top 12 movies grossed $82 million, a drop of 5 percent from last weekend and 12 percent lower than this time last year.

Here's a rundown of the 10 weekend films based on studio figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations:

1. Phone Booth, $15 million
2. What a Girl Wants, $11.4 million
3. A Man Apart, $11 million
4. Head of State, $8.6 million
5. Bringing Down the House, $8.3 million
6. The Core, $6.2 million
7. Basic, $5.4 million
8. Chicago, $5.1 million
9. Agent Cody Banks, $3.6 million
10. Piglet's Big Movie, $2.8 million

(Originally published April 6, 2003 at 1:05 p.m. PT.)