Here’s a fun fact to share with your disbelieving friends/cats: Before this weekend, do you know what was the highest-opening baseball movie of all time? ANSWER: The Benchwarmers, starring David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Napoleon Dynamite. Tread not on mine monocle friends, for in my surprise it has fallen. See? This is why I hate baseball. Anyway, 42 has since stolen the title (just like Jackie Robinson stealing a base!), which is nice, as it seems by all accounts to have been a perfectly fine movie. A nice movie for nice people.
1. 42 (Warner Bros.) – $27.3 million
2. Scary Movie 5 (The Weinstein Company) – $15.1 million
3. The Croods (Fox/DreamWorks) – $13.2 million ($143 mil.)
4. G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Paramount) – $10.8 million ($102 mil.)
5. Evil Dead (Sony) – $9.5 million ($41 mil.)
6. Jurassic Park 3D (Universal) – $8 million ($31 mil.)
7. Olympus Has Fallen (FilmDistrict) – $6.8 million ($81 mil.)
8. Oz: The Great and Powerful (Disney) – $4.8 million ($219 mil.)
9. Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor(Lionsgate) – $4.3 million ($45 mil.)
10. The Place Beyond The Pines (Focus) – $3.8 million ($5.1 mil.) [Indiewire]
Meanwhile, while 42 was out-pacing expectations, Scary Movie 5 was “bombing” or “tanking” depending on who you asked. True, $15.1 million is well down from Scary Movie 4‘s $40.2 million and Scary Movie 3‘s $48 million, but it also only cost $20 million to make, and even that was probably only because Lindsay Lohan was in it and robbed them blind. $15 million is a step in the right direction, but I don’t want to live in a world where Simon Rex lazily regurgitating jokes from 7 years ago earns its budget back. I want to live in a world where everyone wears foam cowboy hats with their names on them and cats are currency, but that’s another story.
