Love Is All Around: Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham in Stallone's The Expendables (top); Javier Bardem and Julia Roberts in Ryan Murphy's Eat Pray Love (middle); Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs the World (bottom)
Friday the 13th at the North American box office. Lucky or unlucky? Well, neither, really.
With three major, eagerly awaited new releases, business had nowhere to go but up. But "up" may not necessarily mean through the roof and toward the stars.
Sylvester Stallone's all-brawn-no-brain actioner The Expendables was, as expected, the no. 1 movie on Friday according to early, rough estimates found at Deadline.com. However, unless those early estimates are off — $13.5m (up from $13m*) on Friday; $34m for the weekend — The Expendables will fall several million below the $35m-$40m some had been expecting.
Starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, Eat Pray Love was the no. 2 movie on Friday, with $9 (down from $9.8m) and an estimated $26.5m (down from $28.3m) for the weekend. Unlike The Expendables, Eat Pray Love will likely have a longer life at the box office and lower drop-off rates in the coming weeks. Action movies tend lose 50%-60% of their take on their second weekend, and The Expendables hasn't exactly received stellar reviews.
At no. 3 was the Will Ferrell-Mark Wahlberg comedy The Other Guys with $5.7m (up from $5.5m) on Friday and $17.2m (up from $17m) for the weekend. That would be about half of what it made last week.
Now, the big Friday disappointment was Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which was supposed to have lured all the geeks and nerds in the western section of the Northern Hemisphere.
Whether the geeks opted to stay home playing videogames while the nerds went looking for thrills and/or inspiration at theaters showing either The Expendables or Eat Pray Love I don't know, but Scott Pilgrim scored an estimated $4.7m (down from $5.2m) on Friday for a possible $11m (down from $13.3m) weekend total.
If so, Scott Pilgrim will have a debut about as (un)successful as Zac Efron's Charlie St. Cloud.
The no. 5 movie is expected to be the Christopher Nolan-Leonardo DiCaprio thriller/sci-fier Inception, with $3.4m on Friday and $11.5m for the weekend.
* The figures found in this article were revised with later estimates also found at Deadline.com. Official studio estimates for Friday will be released Saturday morning.
Note: Those are early, rough estimates that will likely have to be modified on Saturday, when official studio estimates are released.
Ben,
You make several very valid points. Thanks for writing.
It's funny you compare Scott Pilgrim to Charlie St. Cloud. They scored about the same box office but doesn't it show actually why Zac Efron is much more of a star than people are giving him credit for.
Scott Pilgrim had a large advertising campaign with promotion building for 15 months, it had a large cast behind the star Michael Cera who could promote it, and it had great reviews.
Charlie St. Cloud had terrible advertising that started only 11 weeks before the film came out, Zac Efron was the only one pushing it, and it had terrible reviews.
There were many reasons for people to turn up to Scott Pilgrim. Where as Zac Efron's the only reason people turned up to Charlie St. Cloud and he did equal business.
It is unfortunate for Scott Pilgrim and for Zac Efron. Both deserved better than Universal.