Box-Office Wrap-Up: Sep. 24 – Sep. 26, 2010

Laremy put too much faith in the kids and families as his $31.1 million prediction for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole was cut in half. I don’t think this can be considered much of a surprise, especially this is the kind of result tracking predicted, and I’m still baffled at why Warner Bros. thought spending $100+ million on this film was a good idea. The story just doesn’t seem like something little kids are going to be interested in seeing.

A lot of user predictions pegged the film for a big result as well so it wasn’t only Laremy thinking families would be out to support the newest kid film following last week’s lackluster return for Alpha and Omega.

Only a 32.8% dip for Ben Affleck’s The Town is solid business as it went from a $23.8 million opening weekend to a $16 million second weekend. Bustray pegged it for $15.9 million, but most of the commenters were really close on this one. I wondered last week just how good word of mouth would be and apparently it was quite strong. Even though I wasn’t head over heels for this movie, it is nice to see audiences supporting something that’s at least representative of good filmmaking.

Not quite as good as The Town‘s performance, but Easy A‘s 39.5% dip is respectable and shows Emma Stone may have the star power we’ve been looking for. She’s a unique young actress that doesn’t have the same looks as the rest and it appears to me she may have both the talent for the dramatic and the comedic. Are we looking at the new Sandra Bullock here?

I didn’t hear anything good about You Again and apparently neither did anyone else as this one went from a $2.75 million Friday to an $8.3 million weekend. That’s some bad word-of-mouth folks. Laremy dramatically over-estimated this one as well, but John Debono and Bustray come through, both with a scary close $8.2 million pick.

It seems the Betty White craze is finally coming to a close. Thank god.

It amuses me slightly to hear people say good things about this film almost apologetically or with a certain level of surprise as if something from M. Night Shyamalan could or would never be good again. Shyamalan has some good stories in him, the last few just haven’t been his best. He obviously came up with something decent here and director John Erick Dowdle and writer Brian Nelson were able to turn it into something audiences wanted to watch.

Devil‘s now made $21.7 million on a reported $10 million budget. Not too shabby eh?

Resident Evil: Afterlife is now at $52 million domestically plus another $100+ million overseas. Sony/Screen Gems did hold on to a lot of those foreign territories so Resident Evil 5 seems a lot more likely now after last week I completely overlooked foreign markets.

It doesn’t really surprise me this one isn’t performing too well, the title doesn’t exactly pop off the page (unless it had been a porn movie) and the animation doesn’t look too great. At least Legend of the Guardians has some of the best animation and 3D I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It’s now at $54 million on a $32 million budget. There aren’t any foreign numbers on it yet and I wonder how well a film like this will play overseas. We’ll find out next weekend when it hits the UK and expands worldwide throughout November.

Inception is now the only 2010 film to spend more than ten weeks in the top ten as this weekend’s $1.2 million return makes it eleven in a row.

For those wondering The Virginity Hit was a bust and returned only $300,000 from 700 theaters, but Buried did well with $104,500 from 11 theaters making it a $9,500 per theater average. Waiting for “Superman”, however, was the per theater weekend winner, opening in four theaters and taking in $141,000 for $35,250 per. Yowsa!