Box Office: New Moon Almost Blind Sided by Sandra Bullock
Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 29, 2009
Well, we almost had a big upset at the box office this Thanksgiving, as The Blind Side almost toppled The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The fact that The Blind Side did so well this weekend has to rank as an upset in its own right.
The weekend box office gives New Moon $42 million to The Blind Side’s $40 million. What’s more, The Blind Side actually won on Thursday, beating New Moon $9,485,000 to $9,200,000. In fact, The Blind Side did even better than last weekend — it was up 17.6 percent at the box office while New Moon, perhaps not so surprisingly, was down 70 percent!
For the five-day Thanksgiving Day period New Moon earned $65,999,682 while The Blind Side earned $57,530,347 for fifth and sixth all-time, respectively. Overall New Moon crossed the $200 million mark domestically on Friday and The Blind Side is already at $100 million.
As for the new movies this weekend, Old Dogs made $16,846,000 on the weekend and $24,085,000 for the five-day holiday period; Ninja Assassin made $13,135,000 for the weekend and $21,010,000 for the holidays. And The Road made a five-day total of $2,001,000 on 111 screens.
Also notable this weekend is that Disney’s A Christmas Carol was up 30 percent with a weekend haul of $16,003,000, which puts this movie past the $105 million mark. This movie may have opened softer than expected, but it is just continuing to hang in and perform at theaters. I think this is going to keep on doing steady business right through to Christmas.
Top per-screen average goes to The Princess and the Frog, which made an amazing $356,000 per screen — and it was on only two screens!
Overall, the box office this weekend looks like this:
- The Twilight Saga: New Moon – $42,500,000
- The Blind Side – $40,125,000
- 2012 – $18,000,000
- Old Dogs – $16,846,000
- A Christmas Carol (2009) – $16,003,000
- Ninja Assassin – $13,135,000 -
- Planet 51 – $10,200,000
- Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire – $7,090,000
- The Fantastic Mr. Fox – $7,020,000
- The Men Who Stare at Goats – $1,533,000
Overall box office for the five-day period was $278 million which beat the previous record of $244 million in 2000, the year Jim Carrey was in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Man, that seems like a long time ago.
That about does it for now! Happy Thanksgiving and see you once again later this week with more predictions at the Reject Report.
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