Other Crap

Weekend Box Office Results for January 16–18, 2009

For the second straight weekend, viewers flocked to the theaters to see new releases and generally ignored the carry-overs. Although three films were about even on Friday, Mall Cop pulled away from the field over the weekend to finish with a surprising $33 million - some 60% better than expected. Notorious did even better on a per-theater basis, raking in $13,000 per site, compared to about $11,000 for Paul Blart.

Six films are new to the top ten and five of those outperformed their expectations, many of them by significant amounts. Even Hotel Rwanda for Dogs made a comeback over the weekend. The exception was My Bloody Valentine - 3D. The raunchy ad campaign - extolling the full frontal nudity - didn't work as well as hoped, although it still grossed a respectable $22m.

The one carry-over to finish in the top five was Dirty Harry's Gran Torino, which staved off five of the six newcomers to finish a solid second.

It was a tremendous weekend. The gross beat last year's comp by 26%. "Hey," you're thinking, "26% sounds good, but not 'tremendous.'" Well, I'll tell you why it's so spectacular - because the equivalent weekend last year was the best January weekend of all time! The first three weekends of this year have now finished 1, 3, 4 among all-time January weekends, so the Hollywood greedheads must be swimming around in their moneybins like Scrooge McDuck. (Well, except for the ones who invested in Valkyrie.)