Weekend Box Office: Osama Bin Laden Is Dead! (Also: People bought tickets to see Fast Five)
In momentous times such as these, we must remain vigilant and carry on with the important business of the day—like reporting about how much money some stupid movie made at the box office.
To that end, Fast Five—the fifth (and, in our opinion, most satisfying) entry in the Fast And The Furious series—so thoroughly crushed the competition that its $83.6 million weekend more than doubled the highest opener of any other movie in 2011. (That would be Rio with a now-pitiful-looking $39.2 million, though it climbed above the magic $100 million cumulative in its third weekend.) Good reviews and good word-of-mouth—it got an “A” on CinemaScore, for what that’s worth (nothing —ed.)—will surely affect the next box office frame in an interesting way, as Fast Five goes up against another blockbuster hopeful in Thor and may wind up weakening it considerably. To say the week’s other openers were left to battle for scraps is to belittle scraps: The family-friendly movies Prom and Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil landed in fifth and sixth place, respectively, with $5 million and $4.1 million. You could argue that those two movies opened on about 1,000 fewer screens than Fast Five, but then, you’d face this counterargument: The $1,830 and $1,650 per screen averages of Prom and Hoodwinked Too! are not as much as the $22,950 earned by Fast Five.
In limited release, the modest-sized release of the not-screened-for-critics genre film Dylan Dog: Dead Of Night, made $885,000 on 875 screens, for just over a miniscule $1,000 per screen. However, the Werner Herzog 3-D documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams proved to be something of an arthouse event, riding strong reviews to $25,400 per screen on five screens, a monster opening by any standard.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.