Box Office

Here are my thoughts on what happened this weekend at the box office, with Disney’s A Christmas Carol leading the way at $31 million.

As you can tell it’s November, Halloween is now over and Christmas is right around the corner. How do we know this? Because the Christmas movies have started with A Christmas Carol. We also have the horror flick The Box, the thriller The Fourth Kind, and the Oscar season movie The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Well, so much for all the lousy hype about how great that Michael Jackson movie would do. Michael Jackson’s This Is It made only 21 million on the weekend, and with its $3.7 million Thursday haul and $7.4 million Wednesday haul, its grand total is $32.5 million. Big deal!

Welcome to another edition of the Reject Report, and there is one movie, just one movie, that anyone really is focusing on this weekend. It is Michael Jackson’s This Is It, and it goes wide into 3,481 locations on Wednesday.

The big shock is how easily Paranormal Activity won the weekend. It hauled in $22 million, compared to only $14.8 million for Saw VI, which was itself only barely ahead of Where the Wild Things Are.

The winning Paranormal Activity continues to roll, and Saw VI will be rolling out, as well as Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant and the reissue of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas (in limited release). And we also have Astro Boy.

Where the Wild Things Are was the weekend’s big winner, with an opening haul of $32 million. Frankly, though, I thought there was no way this movie was going to do a worse opening than Couples Retreat last week.

This weekend we look forward to the much-anticipated Where the Wild Things Are, based on the best-selling children’s book. Also rolling out is The Stepfather and Law Abiding Citizen, plus we have a Paranormal Activity update as well.

The numbers are in from a surprising weekend at the theaters, with two movies outperforming a lot of the expectations out there by a considerable margin. Seven million for Paranormal Activity? Thirty-five for Couples Retreat? Are you kidding me? No.

Well, it makes it really easy to do a Reject Report column when only one new movie rolls out in wide release. It’s called Couples Retreat and it is the movie we will preview in this week’s box office report.

It’s $25 million dollars this weekend for the hit Zombieland, proving that the zombie movie genre is alive and well. As for the other movies — all I gotta say is where the hell ARE you people?

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is still in theaters making money, but it sure looks as if the defending champ could fall victim to a concerted attack by the zombies and other things.

It was once again Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which dominated the weekend box office, with all the new releases Surrogates, Fame, Pandorum and all the rest coming up well short

This week, we have three movies in wide release — Fame, Surrogates and Pandorum rolling out, and they stand the best chance of knocking off Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Or they may not.

I often say it is “feast or famine” at the box office, and as has been the custom for the past several weeks, the trend held true as Cloudy with a Chance of Meetballs won the weekend with a healthy $30.1 million haul.

We’ve got some heavy A-list talent on hand this weekend at the theaters: Matt Damon! Jennifer Aniston!! Megan Fox!!! And in the end these folks may all end up losing at the box office to 3D CGI spaghetti and meatballs.

When an employee gets the FBI involved in a price fixing investigation, a witless goon and his mustache become the keys to a governmental investigation.

It was the most predictable first place finish ever this weekend, as Tyler Perry continued his usual domination of the box office against all the usual September also-rans and flops. Such is life in September at the theaters.

All I gotta say is thank you very much Tyler Perry for making I Can Do Bad All By Myself. You have made my decision about who finishes first at the box office a whole lot easier.

As expected it was a dead weekend at the theaters this Labor Day weekend — so much so that The Final Destination ended up winning the box office with a haul of only $12.4 million!