Carried along by solid reviews, an insatiable market for 3-D of any kind, and clearly some good word-of-mouth, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs rebuffed all newcomers in its second week, again finishing atop the box office with $24.6 million in returns. Even better: The gross only dropped 18.8% from opening weekend, a rare happening at a time when blockbusters routinely drop 50% or more and an indication that the film has serious legs. (For Sony execs, it’s looking to be Cloudy With A Chance Of Wagyu Beef, am I right? Tip your waitress, et al.) Among the new releases, the Bruce Willis sci-fi crapterpiece Surrogates took second with $15 million and the Fame remake took third with $10 million, but it’s a hollow victory for the former, which cost over four times as much to produce. And both looked good compared to sixth-place finisher Pandorum, a cheap-looking sci-fi-horror dud that didn’t screen for critics and yet somehow failed to capture the imagination of teenagers who enjoy spending their allowance on crappy sci-fi-horror films. It made a paltry $4.4 million.
The action was a little more exciting on the arthouse circuit. Michael Moore’s latest broadside, Capitalism: A Love Story, was a winner with a massive $60,000 per-screen-average on four screens. Whether Moore’s built-in audience can expand as the film goes wider in the coming weeks is another story, but if there was ever a time for anti-capitalist sentiment to gain traction, that time is now. Also opening strong: Coco Without Chanel, a biopic about the early days of the iconic French fashionista Coco Chanel, brought in $35,400 per screen, no doubt cashing in on The September Issue phenomenon. Actor-turned-first-time-director John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men took in $20,600 on one screen, but it seems unlikely that it’ll ride the wave of middling reviews all that far. In less encouraging limited box-office news, the risible Tucker Max blog-turned-movie I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell made $369,000 on 120 screens, failing to follow through on Max’s robust self-promotion. And the Clive Owen weepie The Boys Are Back, with an $8,500 average on six screens, will do nothing to revive Miramax’s flagging fortunes.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.