DELLAMORTE'S BOX OFFICE WRAP UP 2/20/09

This just in: If you haven’t seen Tommy Wisleau’s The Room, you have not lived a complete life. Get as many of your friends together and experience this magic.

It’s probably fair to say that Tyler Perry has people who respond to him when he just does Tyler Perry stuff, and then there’s the people who love his Madea. That audience just loves Tyler Perry going big in a fat woman’s costume and mugging, it seems, and it’s been three years since Perry trotted out his signature character. I thought this might have a bit of a bump in comparison to the last couple Perry films, but a $40 million opening is his biggest ever, and this comes after the world being saturated with Perry’s art. But the audience was likely primed to go to the movies, and so you have a huge opening weekend. Perry’s last Madea doubled its opening weekend, this might do that, maybe a little less. Even with a $40 opening, Perry’s a ways away from ever getting to a nine digit payout. His audience is faithful, but the films don’t cross over.

Holy shit, Taken. Fox probably didn’t know what they had because they opened an action movie on Superbowl weekend, but here we are and the film is about to abduct its way into the hundred million dollar total. And it’s not even done. Watchmen will take a dent out of it, for sure, but Fox only has Street Fighter set for 1000 screens right now, so it’s not like they have faith in Chun Li to stop the Neeson. Expect it to get near $120 or so at this point.

Speaking of good holds, Coraline is over $50. The problem is that next weekend there’s the Jonas Brothers’ 3-D movie, and that’s probably going to take a good number of the Coraline screens and glasses. The film looked insane in 3-D so if you haven’t yet, you’ve still got a couple of days. But Coraline will probably drop a bit because of it. The numbers have been great for this project, all things, so that’s some bullet dodging for Laika.

Everything else took a post-holiday slump. Yeah numbers were inflated by the holiday weekend, but President’s day is not normally so sweet to films. The over 50% drops for He’s Just Not That Into You, Shopaholic and The International are to be expected. He’s Just may not have the juice to get to $100, but there’s no real competition for femme-centric date night choices for a couple of weeks, so it might limp around for a while.

Fired Up seemed to only speak to the Austin crowd, and will die a quick death. I might have been interested if it was R-rated, because bad jokes are sometimes canceled out by gratuitous nudity, or that is to say, I’ve seen Screwballs.

But the one for the record books this week is the top ten drop of Friday the 13th. Falling nearly 81%, last weekend was a perfect storm for the film to do well (holiday weekend, the title being the date of release), and many audiences found the film meh. Next weekend may level the picture out some, so $70-80 Million is the likely stopping point, but it won’t be until then that we’ll see if the audience has rejected the picture. I think the difference between something like this and Cloverfield, is that the latter was a stunt, and when a lot of people finally saw it, their response was “is this it?” whereas here, the Friday Friday number was likely so inflated that the picture had nowhere else to go. Does that mean it’ll get a slight bump in three weeks on the next Friday the 13th? Quite possibly.

Hey, did you know that Slumdog is the Best Picture Oscar front runner? It should cross over $100 Million sometime tomorrowish, once it has its four wins or so. Congrats to Fox Searchlight for taking the picture home.