“Barney’s movie had heart, but ‘Football in the Groin’ had a football in the groin.” This was the reasoning that led Homer Simpson to vote for the wrong film in an inaugural Springfield Film Festival, and that was apparently the reasoning that led audiences to make a thoroughly idiotic live-action/animation hybrid about the origins of the Easter Bunny the number one movie in America this week. With two perfectly good genre films in the mix, Hop easily outpaced the field with $38.1 million in receipts, despite many scenes with James Marsden interacting with a bunny voiced by Russell Brand. That left two ambitious-but-flawed genre entertainments to fight over scraps, with Source Code, director Duncan Jones’ follow-up to Moon, edging out Insidious, a haunted house movie from the makers of Saw, with $15 million to $13.5 million, respectively. But don’t cry for either one of them: Source Code made a big dent in its $32 million budget and Insidious is already well into the black, having cost just $1 million. Whether the latter can be nurtured into another Saw-like franchise remains to be seen, but it’s a major success of scale. Meanwhile, the PG-13 version of The King’s Speech bombed out in its first week of semi-wide release, finishing 14th with a per screen average of only $1,181. A fucking debacle, in other words.
In limited release, there was not a lot of happy news to go around. The Oscar-winner In A Better World fared best, with a healthy $8,850 per screen average on four screens, but results were dire elsewhere. The dark superhero comedy Super continued Rainn Wilson’s cinematic woes with a Rocker-like $4,800 per screen on 11 screens, but it looked like a world-beater compared to the David Schwimmer-directed Trust, which earned just $2,143 per screen on 28 screens, and the colossally dismal Cat Run, which took just $291 per screen on 103 screens.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.