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SUNDAY AM: I now have the weekend’s official numbers, and kudos to my box office gurus for getting them right once again. Moviegoers were in a kick-butt mood, so No. 1 was Lionsgate/The Weinstein Co’s The Forbidden Kingdom, pairing martial arts movie stars Jet Li and Jackie Chan for the first time: it had a $20.8 million weekend after opening to $7.7M Friday and $7.9M Saturday in 3,151 theaters. 
Indeed, ”the smart money” was on Forbidden Kingdom because of its PG-13 rating, one marketer told me. “Its target audience has been reliable in the past.” And it was again. But in a conversation with me this morning, TWC’s Harvey Weinstein, whose company shares domestic and foreign 50/50 with Lionsgate, credited the movie’s success to producer Casey Silver. ”First and foremost, no one has ever seen Jackie and Jet together but Casey Silver got them to do the movie. And then he brought in Rob Minkoff of The Lion King and Stuart Little to make a family movie that appealed to martial arts fans as well as to my daughters aged 5, 10 and 13 who loved it. It’s more fantasy and Narnia than it is a big martial arts movie.” Claiming the pic was made for only $55 million, TWC is quick to point out that Forbidden Kingdom is the first film released under its Asia Fund.
In the 2nd spot was Universal’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall starring and written by How I Met Your Mother TV star Jason Segel under the Judd Apatow banner. It opened with $17.3M after debuting with $6M Friday and $6.8M Saturday from 2,798 venues. ”This is an impressive number for a small R-rated comedy particularly given how tough the market has been lately and this weekend’s crowded field,” A Uni insider says. History shows that the multiple on Apatow films, and the genre in general, is about 4 times the opening weekend’s gross. The modest cost of the film ($30M) puts Universal in a nice place to recoup its investment quickly. Rival studios thought its portrayal of a ”wussy” guy with full-frontal male nudity might turn off Apatow’s strong male fan base. Then again, a watchable comedy has been AWOL from the cineplexes. And Uni’s clever teaser ad campaign — “Who Is Sarah Marshall?” – sparked a lot of Internet interest. Exits showed balance between male/female and young/old: 53% female/47% male, under 30 = 56% ; 30 and older = 44%. Hispanic moviegoers made up the next largest portion of the audience after Caucasians.
Sony’s PG-13 teen slasher pic Prom Night took 3rd its second weekend out, making $3.5M Friday and $3.7M Saturday from 2,700 plays (-56%) for what was a $9.1M weekend and new cume of $32.5M. The studio’s newcomer 88 Minutes starring Al Pacino in a poorly reviewed thriller that already debuted in Europe opened with $2.3M Friday and $2.7M Saturday domestic gross from 2,168 dates for what was a disappointing $6.8M weekend. The studio had hoped for $10M. “This was a North American acquisition for about $5 milllion so the upside with TV and home entertainment makes this a low exposure investment,” a Sony source told me Sunday.
The only other newcomer in the Top 10 was conservative commentator Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which makes the intelligent design argument. Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures fell over the weekend from 8th to 10th place after earning $1.2M Friday and $989K Saturday for a $2.9M weekend. But the per screen average for Friday was a low $1,145 and for Saturday $940 (and $2,830 for the entire weekend), showing there wasn’t much pent-up demand for the film despite an aggressive publicity campaign on right-wing media. So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the ”agenda of liberal Hollywood”. (Just for comparison purposes: left-wing Michael Moore’s most recent Sicko did $4.4 mil its opening weekend from only 441 theaters, and his Fahrenheit 9/11 did $23.9M its opening weekend from 868 venues.)
No. 5 was Fox’s Nim’s Island ($1.5M for Friday, $2.5M for Saturday, $5.6M for the weekend and a new cume of $32.8M); No. 6 was Sony’s 21 ($1.8M for Friday, $2.3M for Saturday, $5.5M for the weekend and a new cume of $21.3M); No. 7 was Fox Searchlight’s Street Kings ($1.2M for Friday, $1.6M for Saturday, $4M for the weekend and a new cume of $19.8M); No. 8 was Fox’s Horton Hears A Who! ($930K for Friday, $$1.5M for Saturday, $3.5M for the weekend and a new cume of $144.4M); and No. 9 was Universal’s Leatherheads ($923K for Friday, $1.3M for Saturday, $3M for the weekend and a new cume of $26.5M).
(FYI: Comments on this website are monitored. If your comment didn’t post immediately, it’s likely I’m away from the computer. Be patient. Also, be original.)
For more estimates listed by title, see box office results here...Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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So Sarah Marshall was on the higher end of Uni’s predictions, decent enough.
Worth noting: The star-less FSM opened bigger than star-powered disappointments like Heartbreak Kid, Drillbit Taylor, Semi-Pro and Fred Claus.
Not that we care about such things in a business blog, but I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall today and I liked it.
Eh, still a bit disappointing. Considering FSM was more promoted everywhere and virally than Forbidden Kingdom. Now it depends of word of mouth if FSM can be considered to join Knocked Up and Superbad in the Apatow Blockbuster wing.
And its budget was probably about 1/3 of what those other films cost because of its lack of “star power.” So a 17m opening weekend is pretty darn sweet.
Of course most “stars” in Hollywood’s A-list couldn’t sell tickets to a bunker during a nuclear war. Their main gift is attracting media attention not audiences.
Also of interest, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden looks like it will only pull in an estimated $1300 in limited release (102 theaters) while Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is looking at around a $3000 average.
With rising gas (the $4 gallon arrived on Thursday) and food prices, expect audiences to only give big business to a select few (Iron Man, Batman, Indy, Hancock.) Make no mistake, people are saving their money and the evidence will be smaller numbers for Speed Racer, Hulk 2, and Get Smart.
2008 will not be a year where people need to see “every” event film.
Expelled’s numbers aren’t bad. Michael Moore’s films had some big studio backing. Expelled was distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures (who?). Why bring up this film when there’s no mention of Spurlock’s film bombing.
Michael Moore’s films have been incorrectly classed as documentaries which everyone knows but the sub-intelligent Hollywood crowd refuses to acknowledge. Why? They would be admitting that they don’t have a clue as to what the real truth is even if it had a passenger jet fly into Universal Studios office building.
Lets see, Gore’s Inconvenient Truth verses todays news of a record snow fall in Juneau Alaska!!!
Your comparison of Expelled with some of Moore’s films does not seem valid as people today are more interested
in fiction that real life.
“So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the “agenda of liberal Hollywood”.
Political conservatives may not consider themselves “creationists” and the advertisements didn’t go into much detail about what the film was about. Just from the ads it looked like a film about public school in general. The few unbiased reviews I read didn’t make it out to be a film supporting creationism but rather about how only one line of thinking is permitted to be discussed in some circles and what happens when you question that line of thinking. We need skeptics and we need contrarians because they keep science honest and nobel. Comparing Ben Stein to Moore is a joke. Moore jumps people and if the footage doesn’t fit the agenda then it gets edited until it does. For example, Moore met Roger Smith and interviewed him. But that didn’t work for his movie so he just forgot about that. The experts in Stein’s movie were invited to speak and were paid for it. That they haven’t heard themselves talk before is not his problem nor that this is probably the first time they have actually had to defend their arguments. Which again gets back to the real point the movie is making.
Nikki, you is one angry bitch. You be writin’ like a ignernt schoolchild.
What you don’t understand is that we conservatives will not pay to see this movie; it was made for liberals to watch. Think about it.
Per Nikki’s sources Expelled is pulling in less than $1200 per screen. Not $3000. Estimates put it pretty close to even with Osama if I understand correctly. I don’t know how to read that, should Spurlock be favored to do better, considering his Super-Size Me doc and his TV show? Thus, would a draw between these films be a de facto victory for Stein? Should Stein’s experiment be seen as a failure because it did not capture the attention of the supposed silent conservative majority? Or should they both be dismissed as not terribly successful, but interesting, attempts to target nonmainstream markets? I don’t know, and I don’t speak from a position of preference for one film or the other. Personally, I’d like to get out to see both films… righty after I catch Zombie Strippers.
Why would you even mention Expelled, and not mention Spulock’s bomb, which averaged far less? And what “agressive” advertising campaign? I haven’t heard of this movie. Why don’t you report the performances, and keep your liberal ajenda to your self.
88 minutes is a good show. Pacino is great!!!! i went to a matinee and there were 7 very happy customers!
I am amazed at how quickly you shunned your supposed objectivity and proclaimed, “So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the “agenda of liberal Hollywood”.” How pathetic of you to say so based on this. I for one, will not pay to watch these liberal propaganda films (i.e. the plethora of current anti-war movies, any mockumentary from Moore, or the ultimate hypocrite – the almighty Al Gore, et al) and CANNOT WAIT FOR MORE CONSERVATIVE PROPAGANDA FILMS to come and compete in the open marketplace. Perhaps then your conservative-a-phobia fears might come true and you can go back to whining about equal time or some other such nonsense.
Pacino should be at the point in his illustrious career where he doesn’t need to work just for the sake of working anymore and should therefore only reserve himself for worthy projects that will make honorable use of his tremendous abilities which is why it’s disconcerting to see him appear in boondoggling tripe such as the abovementioned that justifiably tanked even in the face of nonexistent competition within the adult demographic. Maybe he had to pay off a yacht or something so he just blindfolded himself and sifted randomly through a screenplay pile and settled on whichever stack he came up with.
I saw FSM yesterday evening and felt it was somewhat “eh” though I should probably note that Walk Hard was the only output from the Apatow canon that I was enthusiastic about. With most of these movies if you strip away the envelope-pushing sauciness all you’re really left with is hackneyed material filtered through a banal t.v. sitcom prism of reality. I’m tired of hearing about the big to-do over the guy showing his hog too because it’s used as pure gimmickry in an attempt to make something out of nothing in a ho-hum breakup scene that propels the story in motion. It got a thunderous initial laugh from the audience I saw it with and then the subsequent shots got nervous perfunctory chuckles when it began to dawn on everybody that it was a one trick pony scene. I also think it’s silly that people are lauding this disrobing for balancing the gender scales of onscreen nudity in this day and age when virtually no starlets of high stature bare all anymore for fear of having the unclothed imagery disseminated on the stupid internet. And when an actor is sporting six soft it’s more a display of bragging than an act of daring to don the birthday suit onscreen; Harvey Keitel was more courageous back in the early 90′s when a succession of films prominently showcased his signature acorn. The only thing that really killed me about the movie was something completely separated from the dopey lovelorn schlep storyline: the recurring gag of the CSI send-up where Billy Baldwin apes David Caruso’s mannerisms to hilarious effect.
Note to political zealots within DHD faithful nation: cut to the chase already if you please and start compiling hundreds upon hundreds of heated replies about the expulsion of Expelled from the b.o. charts. I’ve got a big vat of buttered popcorn in tow and I’m ready to see the sparks fly.
Nikke stop shilling for hollywood’s left.
your still cryin in your spiked latte that Brokeback didnt get the oscar for best flick, and you think its all the conservatives fault.
Expelled did pretty d*mn well considering its from “left field” in today’s hollywood climate.
so how much did MMoore make on his first documentary release????
feh….please be a bit more objective will you. its so unbecoming of you.
PS
I luv u still though. but you get under my skin everyone now and then, and this is one of those times :p
Ditto on the obvious conservative bashing in regards to Expelled, Nikke. That was totally gratuitous.
But then again, that’s what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood liberal types: nothing but scorn.
The poor performance of Expelled may have more to do with Ben Stien’s lack luster media media popularity combined with is monotone speaking style than with the content of movie. Oh my! Ben Stien can’t fill a in theater seats to make a blockbuster movie, where’s the surprise? Ferris Bueller’s teacher is not going to sell no matter what he says.
What is worth noting is that the movie experience has finally transcended into the living room, with turn arounds averaging a few months I’ll just wait. I am not a crank but spending 18 dollars (for 2) at a bargain matinee vs $4 for a rental (including NOT leaving my house with online downloads, leaving $14 for….?)be afraid Kirkorian, Regal, Lowes, AMC, et. al. be very afraid! Way back when Lord of the Rings I use to see 45 movies per year, this year ZERO.
If Ben Stein is no Michael Moore, he should take that as a compliment.
Nikki,
What’s the name of the Conservative who claims people will flock to see films not representing the “agenda of liberal Hollywood?” [your quotes]
I read the Con Blogs every day.
Conservatives do point out that many Hard Left films, especially the anti-war films, have failed badly.
But claiming Conservative films would succeed?
Get real. If we thought Con Films could make a profit, we’d have our own studios.
And, “…..aggressive publicity campaign?”
I heard about this film the first time a few days ago. Since I’m not a creationist, I don’t plan on seeing it before it’s released on TV.
Agree with Leo. Are you just unable to resist taking a cheap shot at Stein?
“Expelled” has been advertised all over the place. It’s just that Stein’s movie is, like, four years too late. Everyone but the nutjobs are sick of the so-called “debate”.
Spurlock’s movie isn’t in the top ten and it had a lot more mainstream media exposure than Expelled. Ben Stein’s was talked about a fair bit on the right-wing radio shows and websites, but didn’t reach the mass audiences that the networks gave Michael Moore when he was promoting his films. I’m surprised Expelled made as much as it did, it just doesn’t look like a theatrical release documentary. I’m on the right but not on the ID bandwagon at all so this holds no interest for me.