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Russell Crowe in Better Yuma

Mon., Sep. 10, 2007 3:25 PM PDT by Joal Ryan

Looks like Russell Crowe's getting back on track.

3:10 to Yuma, the Oscar-winner's latest, train-powered western, rode past the weekend box-office competition with $14 million, per final figures Monday from Exhibitor Relations.

The movie is Crowe's first number one opener since Gladiator, for which he won the Best Actor Academy Award.

Crowe had released back-to-back disappointments in Cinderella Man and A Good Year—the box-office slump coinciding with his 2005 arrest for a telephone-throwing incident at a New York hotel.

3:10 to Yuma, costarring Christian Bale as bad-guy Crowe's good-guy counterpart, actually opened smaller than Cinderella Man, which bowed with $18.3 million back in 2005. But the western remake, a redo of the 1957 Glenn Ford oater of the same name, benefited from lower expectations, owing to its low-key, post-Labor Day release (as opposed to Cinderella Man's high-profile summer launch), and its relatively modest budget ($50 million, compared to Cinderella Man's $88 million, per Internet Movie Database estimates).

Shoot 'Em Up, the heavily armed Clive Owen action movie, which also sounds like a western, but isn't, proved no match for the revitalized Crowe and Yuma. The weekend's other major new release managed just $5.72 million, for a fourth-place debut.

Rob Zombie's Halloween, last weekend's box-office champ, scared up another $9.5 million (second place), but saw business drop a very scary 64 percent. Overall, the horror movie has taken in $43.7 million in two weekends.

Elsewhere, Superbad (third place, $7.6 million; $103.2 million overall) became the 16th summer release to pass the $100 million mark.

The odds seem long that this weekend's top 10 evictees, Death Sentence ($1.7 million; $8 million overall) and War ($1.5 million; $20.6 million overall) will ever hit that milestone.

And the odds seem even longer for Will Forte-penned The Brothers Solomon, which opened in a not-insignificant 700 theaters, but grossed only $508,601.

Several films in limited release, meanwhile, enjoyed strong debuts, including Richard Gere's The Hunting Party, which found $39,609 at four theaters. The astronaut-themed documentary In the Shadow of the Moon tallied $38,281 at four theaters. Jeff Garlin, back to his night job Sunday as Larry David's sidekick in HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, did well on his own with his new comedy, I Want Somebody to Eat Cheese With, which made $12,317 at just one theater.

Here's a rundown of the top 10 films based on official Friday-Sunday studio figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations:

1. 3:10 to Yuma, $14 million
2. Halloween, $9.5 million
3. Superbad, $7.6 million
4. Shoot 'Em Up, $5.72 million
5. The Bourne Ultimatum, $5.67 million
6. Balls of Fury, $5.65 million
7. Rush Hour 3, $4.9 million
8. Mr. Bean's Holiday, $3.4 million
9. The Nanny Diaries, $3.2 million
10. Stardust, $1.8 million

(Originally published Sept. 9, 2007 at 2:24 p.m. PT.)