Box Office: Megamind Outdoes Due Date

The blue meanie rules. Megamind, the DreamWorks Animation comedy about a misunderstood evil genius — misunderstood because he's neither evil nor a genius — earned $47.65 million to win the weekend at the North American box office, according to early studio estimates. The splashy 3-D comedy pits Megamind (Will Ferrell) against superhero Metro Man (Brad Pitt) in a tussle for supremacy over Metro City. The weekend result crowned Megamind No. 1, with two movie kings, Robert Downey Jr. and Tyler Perry, staring up.

Megamind triumphed over two strong rivals that also opened on Friday: Due Date, a road comedy teaming Downey with a co-star (Zach Galifianakis) and the director (Todd Phillips) of The Hangover, which pulled in $33.5 million, and Perry's all-star poetry reading For Colored Girls, at $20.1 million. The box office take for all films is predicted to be $154 million, which would be the highest-ever total for a first weekend in November — but not the highest attendance, since a movie ticket, whose price used to be about that of a fast-food burger and fries, now sets you back nearly as much as an entrée at a decent French restaurant.

That's especially true for 3-D movies, the format that brought in two-thirds of Megamind's revenue in its opening frame. The movie's gross for its first three days fell between the $59.3 million earned by DreamWorks' Monsters vs Aliens in 2009 and the $43.7 million earned last March for How to Train Your Dragon. That was a soft opening, which put a dent in the company's stock price; but Dragon enjoyed golden word-of-mouth and finished its domestic run with $217.6 million, for the year's eighth highest domestic total. Megamind, which received an A-minus rating from the CinemaScore poll of exiting moviegoers (just below Dragon's solid A), might end up with similar numbers. And with the studio's goal of having every movie earn $200 million at home and halfa billion dollars worldwide — they think big over at DreamWorks — that would make Megamind a success.

Of the three features released this year from Jeffrey Katzenberg's work- and dream-aholics, only one has been a sequel. That was Shrek Forever After, which earned $737 million worldwide — the lowest take of the three Shrek sequels, but still quite a haul, and the third highest gross of 2010, after Toy Story 3 and Inception. The real trick of any studio, especially one specializing in such expensive items as animated features (the typical DreamWorks budget is north of $150 million), is to create new movies that launch franchises. That's what Katzenberg and his team managed with Dragon, which earned nearly a half billion dollars worldwide and has already stoked preparation for a sequel to be released in 2013. It's still early days for Megamind, which will face stronger competition over the next six weeks than Dragon did in a fallow spring movie season. But with an engaging heroic villain as its lead character, the film could easily be cloned into a Mega 2 a few years hence.

Perry works on much smaller budgets, usually not more than $20 million, and gets reliable results: four of his last six films have earned between $55 million and $90 million. His latest, based on Ntozake Shange's 1974 "choreopoem" For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, is a series of monologues performed by a strong cast that includes Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kimberly Elise and Whoopi Goldberg. Strongly promoted (and, it is said, partly rewritten) by Oprah Winfrey, the movie got the usual savage reviews, which were ignored by Perry's fan base of African-American women. It's the director's eighth film since 2005 to open with more than $20 million.

On the specialty circuit, 127 Hours, the hiking-disaster movie from Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, opened in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles and earned an impressive $265,925, which any indie studio would give an arm or a leg for. As IndieWire's Peter Knegt notes, the $66,481 per-screen average was the second highest of the year, just short of the $70,000 average on seven screens amassed in July by The Kids Are All Right. In a wider opening, on 46 screens, another true-life-ordeal film, Fair Game, took in $700,000 — a good start for the political drama starring Naomi Watts as Bush Administration target Valerie Plame and Sean Penn as her husband Joe Wilson. Two political documentaries keep motoring on, with the financial exposé Inside Job grazing $1 million in its fifth week and the public-school screed Waiting for "Superman" up to $5.4 million in its seventh.

Finally, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the capper to the Swedish trilogy based on Stieg Larsson's Millennium novels, has earned nearly $2 million in just 10 days. Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed lady at the center of the novels and films, is soon to be Hollywoodized by director David Fincher and actress Rooney Mara. But we'd love to see Lisbeth go up against Megamind. That'd be a battle royale that could truly light up Metro City.

Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1. Megamind, $47.65 million, first weekend
2. Due Date, $33.5 million, first weekend
3. For Colored Girls, $20.1 million, first weekend
4. Red, $8.9 million; $71.9 million, fourth week
5. Saw 3D, $8.2 million; $38.8 million, second week
6. Paranormal Activity 2, $7.3 million; $77.2 million, third week
7. Jackass 3D, $5.1 million; $110.8 million, fourth week
8. Hereafter, $4.2 million; $28.7 million, fourth week
9. Secretariat, $4.02 million; $51 million, fifth week
10. The Social Network, $3.6 million; $85 million, sixth week