Loaded Couch Potatoes

Writing this column is gonna be as fun as gargling with onion soda, but my box-office-fu is strong and it will see me through.

It can’t help you get through reading it, though; that’s on you.

(1)  Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs  ($30.1 million, $9651 per screen):  Not too shabby an opening for a kiddie show opening during the first couple of months of the new school year.  It’s got a cute, visually appealing concept, and the movie got decent reviews, so it’ll probably play reasonably well over the next few weeks.  This is the kind of movie that keeps theatres afloat during the lean months of September.

(2)  The Informant!  ($10.5 million, $4210 per screen):  Let’s just say it right out in the open: the studio kinda just dumped this into theatres.  Opening a movie for adults this early on in the football season is a bit like committing box-office suicide, and this tepid opening reflects that.  Add in the fact that a decent number of the rubes who bought tickets attendees probably expected to see something more along the lines The Bourne Informant and I would guess Matt Damon is going to have to rely on Invictus to bring him all of his true ’09 glory.  Too bad; I hear this is a pretty great movie.

(3)  I Can Do Bad All By Myself  ($10 million, $4461 per screen, $37.9 million total):  As is typically the case with Tyler Perry movies, this one nosedove in its second weekend, dropping 57%.  That’s still a good total for a low-budget film, though, and the descent will level off from here, resulting in a total in the $50-60 million range.  Trust me, nobody will be less inclined to bankroll a Tyler Perry movie because of this one.

That won’t be true for the next few names discussed.

(4)  Love Happens  ($8.4 million, $4455 per screen):  An exceptionally weak debut for Jennifer Aniston’s new chick flick, especially considering how well her last couple of films (Marley & Me and He’s Just Not That Into You) performed.  Folks, these are the facts: nobody goes to see a movie because of Jennifer Aniston.  She may not keep people away, either, not if the concept is good (see previous two films); but if there’s not much of a hook, then you can expect a dud.  Here’s another fact: Aaron Eckhart ain’t much of a hook.

You can damn well bet that those two actors’ agents are having a shitty week already.

However, not as shitty as the agent for…

(5)  Jennifer’s Body  ($6.8 million, $2517 per screen):  …Megan Fox.  For the past half-a-year or so, Fox has been all over magazine covers, all over the internet, all over television; omnipresent wouldn’t be the right word, but it’d be close.  In short, the industry has been doing its damnedest to turn Fox into Angelina Jolie 2.0, and for a while there, it looked like they were making some excellent progress.

Screech, crash, bang, boom.  Looks like that progress has been halted.

This is a terrible performance for a movie as relentlessly promoted as this one was.  (The per-screen average is particularly awful.)  And since Megan Fox was nearly the sole focus of that promotion, it really can’t be seen any other way than as a referendum on the actress herself.  It may not kill her career, but it’s certainly going to wound it.

Emerging marginally less scathed: screenwriter Diablo Cody.  The movie got decent reviews, and at least a few of those reviews suggested that the marketing campaign would have been better served focusing on Cody’s dialogue.  Also, this fail is balanced out by a big weekend win for Cody: her Showtime series The United States of Tara picked up a big Emmy nod this weekend for it sstar, Toni Collette.

Also emerging totally unscathed: the adorable Amanda Seyfried, who got mostly great reviews for her role in Jennifer’s Body.  Her star power lives to be tested another day.

(6)  9  ($5.4 million, $2650 per screen, $22.7 million total):  An uninspired second weekend.  This one is fading into cult obscurity pretty quickly.

(7)  Inglourious Basterds  ($3.6 million, $1430 per screen, $109.9 million total):  In terms of pure dollars, this one is now Quentin Tarantino’s most successful film to date.  That’s a big win for everybody involved.  It’ll be interesting to see how the movie fares come awards season.

(8)  All About Steve  ($3.4 million, $1575 per screen, $26.6 million total):  Giving back almost all of those points she earned with The Proposal this summer, this one is a big black eye for Sandra Bullock.

(9)  Sorority Row  ($2.4 million, $961 per screen, $8.8 million):  $961 per screen!  That’s terrible.  Between this and Jennifer’s Body, it’s been a rock-bottom couple of weekends for horror films.  If not for the final flick in the top 10, people would be talking about how horror is dead … again.

(10)  The Final Destination  ($2.3 million, $1316 per screen, $62 million total):  The flick took a big 57% hit this weekend, no doubt due to the opening of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on 3D screens.  The scrapping over 3D screens can be fairly rough, and if more theatres don’t start adding more compatible screens soon, the format is going to have a hard time ever truly becoming anything more than a gimmick.

Next week brings Bruce Willis’s Surrogates, which looks okay and might actually succeed in tearing a few dudes away from the football for a couple of hours.  I’m going to guess that it opens at about $27 million.

Also on the dockets: Astro Boy on Wednesday (nobody cares), Fame (nobody cares), and Pandorum (nobody cares).