UPDATE: Contrary to my earlier report, both Country Strong and Season of the Witch did end up in the top ten. I have updated the numbers at the bottom of this article. The rest of the post remains the same.
It’s an interesting weekend at the box-office as January junk tangles with Oscar hopefuls in the top five. At #1 is Columbia’s new release, the Michel Gondry-directed The Green Hornet bringing in an estimated $11.1 million. The Seth Rogen starrer will be scrambling to hit the $30 million mark. This leaves no chance for the film to hit the four-day Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend record, which is currently held by Cloverfield at $46 million and it will also have a tough time reaching the recent numbers set by Paul Blart: Mall Cop in 2009 ($39.2m) and The Book of Eli last year ($38.4m).
The weekend’s other newcomer, Ron Howard’s Box-Office Mojo‘s numbers that say the average ticket price in 2011 is $7.95 this tells me there’s likely to be over 767,000 unhappy moviegoers that lost money watching this train wreck… and people say critics don’t matter. Yeah, they don’t matter when you don’t bother to pay attention.
Elsewhere, Oscar favorites enjoyed a solid weekend with True Grit coming in third on Friday with $3.1 million. The King’s Speech and Black Swan both expanded this weekend, both adding over 750 theaters each. The result was The King’s Speech coming in fourth with $2.4 million from 1,543 theaters and Black Swan landing at fifth with an estimated $2.3 million from 2,328 theaters.
In talking with a friend on Friday night she offered up an interesting thought to chew on. She told me that everyone she’d heard from that saw The King’s Speech came out of it raving and the highest praise she heard from friends coming out of The Social Network was that it’s “good, but nothing great.”
Other than reading some thoughts online, I’ve heard the exact same things and all the wins The Social Network has been racking up to date have been from critical groups, not guilds or Hollywood muckety-mucks. Is there a chance The King’s Speech slowly begins to take over in the late stages? Tomorrow night’s Golden Globe Awards could be the place where it starts. Be sure to be here with me as I live blog it and we can enjoy reacting to the outcome together.
Other than that, I’ve included Friday’s estimated top ten directly below and will be back here Sunday morning with the complete results. On Sunday I’ll also be posting the results of the Golden Globe user poll predicting the night’s winners. If you haven’t yet participated or want to check the current standings click here and give ’em a look.
- The Green Hornet – $11.1 million
- The Dilemma – $6.1 million
- True Grit – $3.1 million
- The King’s Speech – $2.4 million
- Black Swan – $2.3 million
- Little Fockers – $2 million
- The Fighter – $1.5 million
- TRON: Legacy – $1.4 million
- Season of the Witch – $1.2 million
- Country Strong – $1.1 million
——————— - Yogi Bear – $1 million
- Tangled – $829,000
