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A surprisingly chilling and effective trailer for a completely overplayed exorcism subject matter helped the Anthony Hopkins led horror drama The Rite prosper at this Weekend’s U.S. Box Office Charts. The trailer’s dark tones and well edited footage rewarded Warner Bros. with a $15.1 million opening haul. This may seem like a measly figure especially in light of today’s high ticket prices but when you consider that this past weekend’s overall box office takings were only down 12% from this time last year when Avatar still reigned on top, it makes you realise that January is generally not a hot month for box office business.
The Rite became the highest grossing picture led by Anthony Hopkins in a film where he is not playing the role of Hannibal Lector; a character who is without doubt one of the biggest drawing horror icons of all time.
The Rite comfortably beat out competition from new release The Mechanic , the Jason Statham vehicle which is a remake of the 1972 film of the same name starring Charles Bronson.
The Mechanic’s opening sum is pretty standard for a Jason Statham led picture and I’m sure we’ll be seeing his low rent, gun-ho, mindless action movies for many more years to come. And if not in a sequel to The Mechanic, it’ll be the same movie by a different name. The Statham seem to always find the same loyal and young male-dominated audience and his films nearly always make a sound profit.
The Mechanic actually only opened in third place however as the last week’s rom-com chart topper No Strings Attached fell to second.
I anticipated last week that the film would hang on well given that the new releases offered little towards a young, female target audience and sure enough an impressive 30.5% drop has nearly seen the film achieve the $40 million mark after ten days on release. Given the movie’s modest $25 million budget it’s currently performing rather well.
BOX OFFICE SUCCESS STORY OF THE WEEK :
Part 1 of Harvey Weinstein’s money crazed bid for The King’s Speech paid dividends as the film expanded to two and a half thousand theatres and nearly equalled the gross of The Mechanic in the process. The film saw a 41.3 % gross increase from the previous weekend and the Best Picture favourite is now close to making five times its production budget with a $72.2 million domestic total. Part 2 of Weinstein’s bid will be to try to do something about the film’s R rating .
BOX OFFICE FLOP OF THE WEEK:
127 Hours also attempted to catapilise on its recent string of Oscar nominations as Danny Boyle’s film expanded to 916 theatres. In spite of this however the picture could only take in a rather disappointing $2.5 million dollars. Given the film’s $18 million budget there is no real cause for concern but Fox Searchlight, the film’s distributors would have hoped that its new less bleak, marketing material would have helped to put more asses in seats.
Little Fockers may have won the initial battle to the top spot over Christmas but True Grit has definitely won the war as the western overtook Little Focker’s overall gross despite having access to just over a third of the comedy sequel’s budget.
Elsewhere The Green Hornet had a decent week dropping just $34.9 percent to take $78.8 million overall and Oscar contenders Black Swan and The Fighter continue to hold on admirably inside the top ten.
As you can see from the chart below it was a very tight box office weekend but expect that to change next weekend with the release of the James Cameron produced thriller Sanctum 3-D and the psychological teen horror The Roommate.
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