Tina Fey, Steve Carell and Mark Wahlberg in a scene from Date Night
News Item A: The romantic comedy Date Night, starring Steve Carell of The Office and 30 Rock's Tina Fey as a married couple in peril, won the weekend box-office race, narrowly beating last week's champ, Clash of the Titans. NBC's prime-time lineup on Thursday may no longer be "Must See TV," but two of the network's Thursday stalwarts paired for a Must See Moo-vee.
News Item B: The mythological adventure Clash of the Titans was No. 1 for a second week, narrowly defeating the Steve Carell–Tina Fey romantic comedy Date Night and proving the box-office muscle of movies released in 3-D. This was the 13th week in the past 17 that a 3-D picture has topped the weekend tally.
Actually, we don't yet know who won the battle of Greek-myth fighting and rom-com fun. 20th Century Fox posted a weekend total for Date Night of $27.1 million at the North American box office, while Warner Bros. said that Clash of the Titans had earned $26,875,000. That's a difference of just $225,000, or less than 1%. The final, actual grosses will come out on Monday afternoon.
Here's the deal: when the studios release their weekend grosses on Sunday morning, they have hard numbers for Friday, rough estimates for Saturday, and for Sunday they use a combination of exit-polling, comparison of their movies with others in the same genre, bracketology and tea leaves. In other words, they guess. Sometimes they guess wrong. On the first Sunday of June last year, Warner Bros. announced that its new comedy The Hangover had taken in $43.3 million, which made it second to Pixar's animated feature Up, at $44.2 million. The final count showed that The Hangover had surged on Sunday to earn $1.6 million more than predicted, which made it that weekend's champ by $840,000. Why, then, do studios race to provide guesstimates when the weekend isn't over? Because there's usually not much news on Sunday, and the hit films get free publicity on that day's news shows. Marketing trumps math.
[MONDAY UPDATE: The final numbers produced a mild upset. Clash of the Titans won the weekend with an actual $26.6 million (close to the Warner Bros. estimate) to Date Night's $25.2 million. Fox honchos had predicted that Tina and Steve would enjoy a $7.1 million Sunday date, which proved to be fully 30% higher than the $5.43 million the movie took in. How to Train Your Dragon's estimated $25.4 million was also a little high; the true total was $24.9 million. So Clash gets to brag in this week's commercials that it's still the No. 1 movie in America — though because of its higher 3-D prices in many theaters the picture was probably seen by fewer people than Date Night.]
Date Night, directed by Shawn Levy of the Night at the Museum franchise, performed slightly above industry expectations, whichever slot it finally occupies. It will finish well ahead of Fey's 2008 star vehicle, Baby Mama, and if the estimates hold, it will have sold about the same amount of first-weekend tickets as Carell's first hit, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The movie benefited from one of those titles that virtually demands that a couple see it, as when Valentine's Day was released on Valentine's Day weekend. And though Date Night gleaned only a modest B rating from CinemaScore's exit poll, it could get a Sunday bump from Fey's stint over the weekend as guest host on Saturday Night Live — the coolest form of cross-promotion, especially when SNL's musical guest was teen fave Justin Bieber. Now every girl from 8 to 14 knows about Fey's movie too.
Clash dropped 56% from its opening weekend — not a disastrous plummet, considering that the movie got mixed-to-hostile reviews and a lowish B-minus CinemaScore rating, and that the geekosphere was vexed that Clash was converted at the last minute from 2-D to fake 3-D. (Call it faux-D.) Costing $125 million to make (compared with Date Night's $55 million), the movie has already earned $110 million in North America and another $45 million abroad. Action movies almost always do better in foreign markets than comedies. Baby Mama, for example, took in $60.5 million at home and only $3.7 million in the rest of the world.
The acid test of a movie's popularity is its staying power. Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? fell a precipitous 62.4% from its opening three days — the biggest second-weekend drop since Valentine's fell 70.4%. Perry's fan base is avid but limited; nearly everyone who wants to see his films sees them the instant they hit the theaters. Other movies keep soaring on good word of mouth. How to Train Your Dragon opened two weeks ago at $43.7 million, on the weak side for a DreamWorks 3-D animated feature. But it fell only 34% in its second weekend, and for its third time around, it dropped just 12.6%. In 17 days the movie has taken in more than a quarter-billion dollars worldwide. Also, as Clash quickly fades, and with no new 3-D movie opening until Shrek Forever After (also from DreamWorks) on May 21, Dragon will retain those thousands of screens that charge higher ticket prices. And that's something to roar about.
From macro to micro: at the bottom of the top 10 is Letters from God, a Christian-themed inspirational drama about a kid with cancer and his Almighty pen pal. The movie earned $1,250,000 on 897 screens, way below last year's Christian semi-hit Fireproof. But Letters cost only $3 million to make, so it could turn a profit, if the faithful keep contributing to the multiplex collection plate.
Here are the weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. Date Night, $27.1 million, first weekend
2. Clash of the Titans, $26.9 million; $110.4 million, second week
3. How to Train Your Dragon, $25.4 million; $133.9 million, third week
4. Why Did I Get Married Too?, $11 million; $48.5 million, second week
5. The Last Song, $10 million; $42.4 million, second week
6. Alice in Wonderland, $5.6 million; $319.3 million, sixth week
7. Hot Tub Time Machine, $5.4 million; $37 million, third week
8. The Bounty Hunter, $4.3 million; $56 million, fourth week
9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, $4.1 million; $53.8 million, fourth week
10. Letters to God, $1.1 million, first weekend