If opening weekends are elections, Eddie Murphy just lost in a landslide. "Meet Dave" grossed $5.3 million at 3,300 screens -- that's a $1,606 per-screen-average, downright pathetic for a heavily marketed comedy featuring a major star. (Can we still say that about Eddie? Maybe not.) The comic can take heart that "Dave" did marginally better than "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" (a $2.1 million opener in 2002) -- but it also did much, much worse than "Norbit" ($34 million in February of 2007). What's the lesson here for Murphy? Stay away from sci-fi themes? More dramatic supporting roles like "Dreamgirls"? Hide under a rock for a few years?
The weekend's big winner was "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," buoyed by a wave of great reviews and a want-to-see primed by the first film's DVD success. $36 million in grosses put it well above the 2004 opening weekend for "Hellboy" ($23 million), and the per-screen-average was $11,200, far above "Meet Dave."
The big smackdown, in fact, was between "Hellboy II" and "Hancock," which made $33 million its second weekend out and has grossed $165 million to date. Fine; with a $150 million budget (not counting marketing costs), the Will Smith vehicle will need to rake in major dollars (and euros and yen) to break even.
"Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D" made a very tidy $20 million, 57% of which came from the 854 theaters (or 30% of the total) equipped with RealD projectors. Which makes sense, since why would anyone want to see a movie with "3D" in the title in a 2D version?
In limited release, the twisty French suspense chiller "Tell No One" is doing bang-up business with a $13,388 per-theater-average at 18 theaters; Boston gets it on August 1. Before then, of course, comes the one-two punch of "The Dark Knight" and "Mamma Mia!" this Friday -- perhaps the most demographically balanced double tsunami of the summer.
Here's the Box Office Mojo chart and here's Leonard Klady at Movie City News.
