As many were pointing out in the comments on The Smurfs had the 3D upcharge in its favor. Nevertheless, that $36.2 million tie for the top spot had to be broken and as it turns out Cowboys ended up the winner by $819,653 taking home $36.4 million compared to $35.6 million for The Smurfs.
Otherwise, things didn’t change much, but as I discussed in my editorial this morning, the return for Cowboys & Aliens wasn’t nearly the $45 million that was expected going into the weekend. The Smurfs, on the other hand, on a reported $110 million budget outperformed their expected $18-22 million for the weekend.
I also wanted to correct myself and my comments on Sunday morning regarding Friends with Benefits. Here’s what I wrote on Sunday:
I apologize for continuing to compare this film to No Strings Attached, but it’s the obvious choice and it’s an interesting comparison considering it was unable to match the previous film’s opening weekend and now it has suffered a 50% drop in its second weekend. No Strings only fell 31.8% in its second week and actually didn’t drop more than 47% in any weekend until week six. Personally, I thought Friends with Benefits was a far superior film, but it looks like most people won’t find that out until it hits DVD and Blu-ray.
The problem with this is, while Friends with Benefits may have suffered a larger drop from one weekend to the next when compared to No Strings Attached, the two films aren’t that far apart in overall box-office, due to the fact that people are on summer vacation from school and have more time to see movies during the week. As it turns out, Friends with Benefits is only $1,326,331 behind where No Strings Attached was after two weekends at the box-office. It isn’t much of a big deal, but I just wanted to make sure I corrected myself.
As for the weekend top ten, you can check out the full chart right here.
