Rooney Mara as Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street
A favorite bogeyman returned to movie houses with results that were scarily familiar. A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Jackie Earle Haley replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, topped the North American box office with $32.2 million, nearly three times the take of its closest rival, How to Train Your Dragon. The other debut film in wide release, Furry Vengeance, opened with a dismal $6.5 million, according to early studio estimates — though there's no telling whether the cause was murder by Freddy's minions or simple artistic suicide.
The five older films in the top seven slots all held a majority of their audiences, with Dragon dropping only 29% (this coming week it will cross the $200 million domestic box-office mark and $400 million worldwide), Tina Fey and Steve Carell's Date Night 27%, Jennifer Lopez's The Back-Up Plan 41%, The Losers 36% and Clash of the Titans 33%. Only Kick-Ass, Death at a Funeral and Oceans took steeper falls. Attendance was sparse overall; moviegoers are saving their money for the summer blockbuster season, which begins on Friday with Iron Man 2.
This ninth episode in the Krueger series (if the 2003 Freddy vs. Jason face-off is included), Samuel Bayer's Nightmare is a pretty close version of Wes Craven's 1984 original about a monster who invades teenagers' dreams. The new entry continues the trend of '70s-'80s horror-franchise remakes that serves as one of the strongest arguments for Hollywood's total creative depletion. It follows The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003 ($28.1 million first weekend, $80.6 million total), The Amityville Horror in 2005 ($23.5 million, $65.2 million), Halloween in 2007 ($26.4 million, $58.3 million) and last year's Friday the 13th ($40.6 million, $65 million).
You'll note the increasingly sharp fall-offs from the first weekend to the rest of the run; horror-movie remakes are often three-day phenomena. The new Nightmare might have shortened that to one day, since it amassed $15.8 million, or nearly half its weekend total, on Friday (including Thursday midnight showings). The kids who wanted to see it and the young adults who remembered being scared witless by the earlier films lined up early. But when they came out, they didn't tweet "must see" to their friends; the picture received a near failing C+ from the Cinemascore polling of people leaving the movie. Yet Warner Bros.–New Line is said to be preparing a sequel in 3-D. That's not so much scary as depressing.
In Hollywood, of course, nothing is as horrifying as a big fat flop. Furry Vengeance, a purported family comedy consisting mostly of woodland creatures biting Brendan Fraser in the nuts, continued the amiable star's bad luck over the past two years. Since 2008, when his semihit adventure-movie tandem The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth both squeezed past the $100 million mark, Fraser has starred in Inkheart ($7.6 million first weekend, $17.3 million total domestic gross) and Extraordinary Measures ($6 million, $12.1 million). He's now planning a Journey sequel. Anthony D'Alessandro of Indie Wire notes that "six years ago, Furry was perceived as a project that would segue The Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell to box-office stardom — that's before The 40-Year-Old Virgin changed his career." So Furry was the movie project that couldn't die — until the weekend it opened.
In specialty houses, the big hit is the Swedish-language version of Stieg Larsson's international best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which after six weeks has earned $4.1 million. (David Fincher, of Se7en and Benjamin Button renown, is set to direct the Hollywood — what else? — remake.) In new indie action, Nicole Holofcener's femme relationship comedy Please Give opened smartly, with $128,696 on five screens, while the Michael Caine crime drama Harry Brown took $180,957 in 19 venues. Two films in their third week looked primed for art-house-hit status: the Oscar-winning Argentine thriller The Secret in Their Eyes passed the $1 million mark, and Exit Through the Gift Shop, the quasi-documentary about mysterious English graffiti artist Banksy, is at about $650,000. Granted, in real dollars, that's just a tenth of Furry Vengeance's disastrous three-day take, but for a pinchpenny indie film, it's gold.
Here are the weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street, $32.2 million, first weekend
2. How to Train Your Dragon, $10.8 million; $192.4 million, sixth week
3. Date Night, $7.6 million; $73.6 million, fourth week
4. The Back-Up Plan, $7.2 million; $22.95 million, second week
5. Furry Vengeance, $6.5 million, first weekend
6. The Losers, $6 million; $18.1 million, second week
7. Clash of the Titans, $5.98 million; $154 million, fifth week
8. Kick-Ass, $4.45 million; $42.2 million, third week
9. Death at a Funeral, $4 million; $34.8 million, third week
10. Oceans, $2.6 million; $13.5 million, second week