Alternate headline: “Reports of 3D’s Demise May Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.”
Hot on the heels of a pretty damning report by Slate on the declining profits of 3D and the news that 2D has been kicking 3D’s ass in head to head screenings, a 3D re-release of The Lion King more than doubled the gross of its nearest competitor at the box office this weekend. Call it 3D’s dead cat bounce, or an allegory for notorious choker Tony Romo torching my Niners in overtime yesterday (ROMO! *shakes fist*).
| This Wk |
Last Wk |
Title | Distributor | Weekend Gross | Cumulative Gross |
Wks | # of Theat. |
| 1 | – | The Lion King | N/A | $29,300,000 | $29,300,000 | 1 | 2330 |
| 2 | 1 | Contagion | Warner Bros. Pictures | $14,480,000 | $44,192,000 | 2 | 3222 |
| 3 | – | Drive | FilmDistrict | $11,018,464 | $11,018,464 | 1 | 2886 |
| 4 | 2 | The Help | DreamWorks Studios | $6,438,000 | $147,365,000 | 6 | 3014 |
| 5 | – | Straw Dogs | Screen Gems | $5,000,000 | $5,000,000 | 1 | 2408 |
| 6 | – | I Don’t Know How She Does It | The Weinstein Company | $4,502,000 | $4,502,000 | 1 | 2476 |
| 7 | 4 | The Debt | Focus Features | $2,945,897 | $26,543,546 | 3 | 1831 |
| 8 | 3 | Warrior | Lionsgate | $2,770,000 | $9,912,300 | 2 | 1883 |
| 9 | 6 | Rise of the Planet of the Apes | 20th Century Fox Distribution | $2,625,000 | $171,618,406 | 7 | 2340 |
| 10 | 5 | Colombiana | Sony Pictures Releasing | $2,300,000 | $33,347,000 | 4 | 1933 |
In other news, Drive did okay for a great movie that almost every girl I’ve talked to† hated (no small feat for a film starring that doe-eyed drink of honeybutter, Baby Goose), and I Don’t Know How She Does It stunk up the joint (shocker, I know). But not as much as Bucky Larson, which isn’t on the above graph because it landed at number 22, tied with Midnight in Paris, which opened 18 weeks ago. Bucky Larson earned $243 per screen, which is less than a third of what it averaged last week, when the average audience was eight people. You do the math.
In related news, a “lion king” is when you put your thumb in a girl’s butt, then wipe it on her forehead and hold her over a cliff. Some say it has the highest degree of difficulty of all Urban Dictionary sex moves.
[via Yahoo, BoxOfficeMojo]
†In fairness, it was like three girls, and they were all pretty dumb