Brad Pitt's Fat Basterds

Star-led Quentin Tarantino war flick rules weekend box office with estimated $37.6 mil

Brad Pitt did not grow a mustache in vain.

Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's own personal World War II starring Pitt and the actor's adorned lip, routed the weekend competition with an estimated $37.6 million gross.

The take marked the biggest opener of Tarantino's career, and one of the biggest of Pitt's.

Elsewhere, District 9 fell to second, but kept making its $30 million budget look like a killer investment.

Drilling down into the numbers:

• Tarantino's previous weekend-best was Kill Bill Vol. 2's $25 million opening.

• For Pitt, the $70 million Basterds' debut basically ranks just ahead of Ocean's Thirteen's and just below Ocean's Eleven's.

• District 9 grossed $18.9 million, and pushed its domestic bank account total to $73.5 million, well more than double its production budget.

• While Tarantino has recovered nicely from Grindhouse, his cohort hasn't. Robert Rodriguez's family film Shorts managed only $6.6 million in its debut, the weakest for Rodriguez since his film-festival breakthrough, El Mariachi. 

• Welcome to the real, cruel world, Post Grad. The Alexis Bledel comedy followed in the footsteps of I Love You, Beth Cooper and Bandslam, and fell right into a hole: a $2.8 million, 10th place debut. 

• (500) Days of Summer ($2.4 million), just about the only teen/twentysomething comedy to make a mark this summer, exited the Top 10 after a $22.2 million run that made very good on its reported $7.5 million budget.

• Via Twitter, Jeremy Piven wants to hear why you haven't seen The Goods ($2.7 million), out of the Top 10 after just one not-so-good weekend.

• All Renée Zellweger needed to change her box office luck was a little George Hamilton. The Zellweger-led, Hamilton-inspired road-trip movie, My One and Only, looked big in limited release, grossing $60,708 off only four screens.

• Guess the X-Games has to be seen in person to be believed. X-Games 3D: The Movie bombed, averaging only $572 at each of its nearly 1,400 theaters.

• Did you know Ashton Kutcher was in a new movie this summer? Of course not. The gigolo-celebrating Spread made only $122,948 at 103 theaters last weekend. Grosses weren't known yet for this weekend.

Here's a complete look at the weekend's top-grossing films based on Friday-Sunday estimates as compiled by Exhibitor Relations:

1. Inglourious Basterds, $37.6 million
2. District 9, $18.9 million
3. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, $12.5 million
4. The Time Traveler's Wife, $10 million
5. Julie & Julia, $9 million
6. Shorts, $6.6 million
7. G-Force, $4.2 million
8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, $3.5 million
9. The Ugly Truth, $2.9 million
10. Post Grad, $2.8 million

(Originally published Aug. 23, 2009, at 9:03 a.m. PT)