Jeff Bridges in True Grit
The New Year's films starring Nicolas Cage and Gwyneth Paltrow, Oscar winners from another millennium, could not derail the top Christmas holdovers. True Grit ($15 million) finally overtook Little Fockers ($13.8 million) for the No. 1 position this weekend at the North American box office, according to early studio reports. Cage's medieval mishmash, Season of the Witch, landed in third place, with $10.8 million, while Country Strong, Paltrow's sex-change version of Crazy Heart, was sixth with $7.3 million. Crazy Heart star Jeff Bridges showed double power with moviegoers this weekend, starring in True Grit as well TRON: Legacy, which finished fourth with $9.8 million.
Many slots in the weekend's list were filled with pictures hoping to contend for this year's Academy Awards. Black Swan, the ballet freak-show starring Best Actress sure-shot Natalie Portman, continued its en-pointe march toward Oscar Night, grossing $8.35 million at a mid-level 1,584 theaters for a six-week total of $61.5 million — quite a haul for a film that cost only $13 million to make. That royal talk-show The King's Speech, with Best-Actor Oscar favorite Colin Firth as the stammering King George VI, did even better, screen for screen, amassing $6.8 million at just 758 theaters; the Weinstein Company inspirational had a production budget of just $15 million and has taken in $33.3 million so far. Another of Weinstein's Oscar hopefuls, the domestic drama Blue Valentine, collected $719,000 at a mere 40 theaters, for the weekend's highest per-screen average.
On a sleepy weekend, with total revenue down 17% from the same frame last year, Hollywood's money-counters prefer to look back to the satisfying stats of the previous year. We'll get to them in a moment. But first, here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. True Grit, $15 million; $110.4 million, third week
2. Little Fockers, $13.8 million; $124 million, third week
3. Season of the Witch, $10.7 million, first week
4. TRON: Legacy, $9.8 million; $147.9 million, fourth week
5. Black Swan, $8.35 million; $61.4 million, sixth week
6. Country Strong, $7.3 million; $7.4 million, third week
7. The Fighter, $7 million; $57.8 million, fifth week
8. The King's Speech, $6.81 million; $33.3 million, seventh week
9. Yogi Bear, $6.81 million; $75.6 million, fourth week
10. Tangled, $4.75 million; $175.9 million, seventh week
THE YEAR IN REVIEW
Last year's domestic box office stayed in a profitable lull: according to Paul Dergarabedian at Hollywood.com, the total take in domestic theaters was $10.57 billion, just off the record $10.6 billion in 2009. Attendance was another, sadder story, dropping 5.24% from 1.421 billion tickets sold to 1.346 billion; that's the second lowest total in 14 years — only the 2008 tally was worse. The revenue for the summer of 2010 was the lowest in five years; and for the Nov.–Dec. holiday season, attendance was down 18% from last year.
Fortunately for the U.S. film industry, people watch movies abroad too — our movies. Dergarabedian notes that foreign grosses rose by $2 billion, to $17.6 billion, accounting for 62% of the worldwide total. And there was virtually no difference between the top-grossing movies in North American theaters and those abroad. What's popular here is popular there. No film from Europe or Asia could match the appeal of the big-studio product. Hollywood rules the world.
Let's look at the list of top-grossing films released last year in North American theaters, again per Box Office Mojo, with each movie's MPAA rating:
1. Toy Story 3, rated G, $415 million
2. Alice in Wonderland, PG, $334.2 million
3. Iron Man 2, PG-13, $312.4 million
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, PG-13, $300.5 million
5. Inception, PG-13, $292.6 million
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, PG-13, $287.7 million (still in theaters)
7. Despicable Me, PG, $251.4 million (still in theaters)
8. Shrek Forever After, PG, $238.8 million
9. How to Train Your Dragon, PG, $217.6 million
10. The Karate Kid, PG, $176.6 million
Since the books still aren't closed on the 2010 releases that are still in theaters, and since the Disney animated feature Tangled is currently less than a million dollars below The Karate Kid's total, it will likely push the Jaden Smith–Jackie Chan vehicle out of the top 10 by mid-week. But Tangled may itself be evicted from the 10-spot if TRON: Legacy or Little Fockers or True Grit shows sustained muscle. The films in the one-to-nine slots should hold.