Who was the big winner at the box office this weekend? It was Sony (NYSE: SNE) and its 21 movie starring Kevin Spacey. According to early estimates at Boxofficemojo, the film took in over $23 million in its first three days of release. Looks like the market is finally getting at least a little tired of News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! -- it fell to second place, raking in about $17 million, enough to put it beyond the coveted -- although not so impressive anymore -- $100 million mark.
Here, though, is the big surprise of the weekend from where I'm sitting -- maybe I'm not with it or something, but I thought that Superhero Movie was going to dominate. It was released by MGM and Dimension. How in the world could this have missed? It came in third with a horrible estimate of $9.5 million -- let's hope that number gets revised upward, because a gross of less than $10 million for a movie that should have been popular to the Scary Movie generation is pretty embarrassing. It seemed to have an effective marketing campaign, though; the commercials described what looked like a fun time at the multiplex, bringing home the fact that the spoof of films such as Spider-Man and X-men probably contained quite a few bellylaugh moments. Guess the timing just wasn't there for it.
Lions Gate Entertainment's (NYSE: LGF) Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns was fourth with about $7.8 million. Its cume so far is approximately $32.8 million, not too bad for the franchise at this point. Another film I thought was going to do much stronger business in the market, Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Drillbit Taylor, continues to disappoint. It is now in fifth place after starting out in fourth place, and it's only made about $20 million in two weeks. Terrible. Shareholders of Viacom certainly expected better. Then again, shareholders of Disney (NYSE: DIS) aren't faring much better with College Road Trip, which hasn't exactly been packing 'em in; after four weeks, the movie hasn't gone too far beyond $38 million. I'd love to know what the budget on that one was. But I'll give 21 its due -- it fended off a superhero attack with its casino-card-counting caper. Let's see if the crowds will ante up for it next weekend...
Disclosure: I own shares of Disney; positions can change at any time.
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