The Smurfs
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4. Audiences don't want new things
Like a kid who resists hearing a bedtime story for the first time but loves hearing it for the hundredth, movie audiences want to see what they've already seen, in one medium or another. Of the 11 films that have topped the weekend box office since late April — Fast Five, Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Hangover Part II, X-Men: First Class, Super 8, Green Lantern, Cars 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Captain America: The First Avenger — all but one was either a sequel or part of a comic-book action-hero dynasty. Only Super 8 was an original idea, and like Cowboys & Aliens, it was a Spielberg-produced genre blender about an alien in a small town. The J.J. Abrams movie opened to $35.5 million, similar to this weekend's gross for the Favreau film, but cost only $50 million to make, or less than a third of the Cowboys & Aliens budget. Yoking an alien-invasion story to a western setting, the movie was both too old a genre and too fresh a concept. The result: bang-bang, cowpoke, you're dead.
Elsewhere, the PG-13 romantic buddy comedy Crazy Stupid Love earned an O.K. $19.3 million in its opening weekend, and the Harry Potter finale, after less than three weeks' release, became the ninth film in history to earn at least $1 billion at the worldwide box office. (Transformers 3, now at $983 million, should reach the 10-digit mark in a week or so.) In indie action, the low-budget alien-invasion movie Attack the Block opened well, with $130,000 at eight venues; The Guard and The Devil's Double each took in about $20,000 per screen in limited release; and Miranda July's heavily hyped comedy The Future earned a comely $28,200 at a single New York theater.
Those four films can fight it out for bragging rights among the cinema cognoscenti. The quadrangular showdown will be less bloody than the one between Cowboys & Aliens and The Smurfs and — since each of the new indie films had a budget of $1 million tops — a lot less costly.
Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. Cowboys & Aliens, $36.2 million, first weekend, tied with
1. The Smurfs, $36.2 million, first weekend
3. Captain America: The First Avenger, $24.9 million; $116.8 million, second week
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, $21.9 million; $318.5 million, third week
5. Crazy Stupid Love, $19.3 million, first weekend
6. Friends with Benefits, $9.3 million; $38.2 million, second week
7. Horrible Bosses, $7.1 million; $96.2 million, fourth week
8. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, $6 million; $337.9 million, fifth week
9. Zookeeper, $4.2 million; $68.7 million, fourth week
10. Cars 2, $2.3 million; $182.1 million, sixth week