Weekend Box Office: Avengers Assemble! (In South Korea, Brazil, The Philippines, etc.) 

With the summer movie season beginning in earnest this Friday with The Avengers, American audiences left their piggybanks unhammered over the weekend, saving their pennies until the likes of Marvel and Hasbro start presenting something. (Either that or they splurged to see The Avengers overseas, where it raked in $178 million in 39 foreign territories, an early indictor that it might nudge Think Like A Man from the top spot next weekend.) Not only did all four new releases fail to shake the Steve Harvey juggernaut from #1 with $18 million, none of them came close. The Aardman production The Pirates! Band Of Misfits continued the company’s unaccountable struggles to find an audience for its reliably charming, hand-crafted fare. At $11.4 million, the film had the worst opening yet for Aardman, though it falls on the $63.8 million safety net of overseas grosses. The weekend’s most mysterious disappointment was The Five-Year Engagement, the latest from the Judd Apatow hit factory, reteaming Forgetting Sarah Marshall collaborators Nicolas Stoller and Jason Segel. The good news about its $11.2 million fifth-place finish is that it won’t take much to recoup its relatively frugal $30 million budget; the bad news is that Segel will now kept in a dust-choked, abandoned theater in Hollywood until The Muppets rescue him in twee act of Gen-Z nostalgia. There’s no silver lining, however, for the Jason Statham vehicle Safe and the John Cusack-does-Poe movie The Raven, which battled it out for sixth place, with Statham eking out $7.7 million to Cusack’s $7.25 million.

In limited release, Bernie benefitted from the coveted A.V. Club bump, scoring a world-beating $30,133 per screen average on three screens and showing some promise as a potential sleeper as it rolls out against the summer blockbusters. Despite good reviews and a burgeoning talent in writer-star Brit Marling (who also co-wrote and starred in the well-reviewed but little-seen Another Earth), Sound Of My Voice limped in with a $8,000 per screen average.

For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.

 
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