Weekend Report: Everyone’s Taken With Taken

by Furious
February 2nd, 2009

The Super Bowl was not kind to the theaters. The total take at the box office was $103,002,446- 20% off from last week, but it was up $2 million from last year, so I guess that’s a success.

It turns out Liam Neeson is an action star. If I had said Taken would account for 24% of the total money spent at movie theaters this past weekend, I wouldn’t have waited for you to call me crazy, I’d have done it myself. It almost doubled my prediction and nearly hit the $26 million I originally calculated. The $24,717,037 it made was pretty impressive considering it nearly doubled up on the most popular movie of 2009- Paul Blart: Mall Cop. And it was the biggest opening for any movie Luc Besson has been involved with.

The Uninvited came in third place with $10,325,824, about $3 million up on my prediction. Before knocking off a third of the calculated total because of the Super Bowl, I this one making $10,969,937. Maybe I should just stick with the numbers I get and quit trying to be smart. It was another success for PG-13 horror. I’m glad it won’t be going away any time soon. Sweet!

Stumbling in at number eight was New in Town. I did a little better on this one, off of the $6,741,530 total by $600,000. It turns out that no one is really all that turned on by Renee Zellweger. But the movie will go own in history as the 16th biggest opening on a Super Bowl weekend. Way to go!

Notorious took another huge drop this weekend, all the way to $1,700,301. For the second weekend in a row it’s dropped 70% from the previous weekend. $20.5 million to $1.7 in three weeks. Yikes.

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