Weekend Box Office: 72 Hours Of Win

By Scott Tobias | November 8, 2010 | 2:50pm

Aux Features Film

And you get a car! And you get a car! And you get a car! It was that kind of weekend at the box office: It almost didn’t matter who was on top, because there was enough business for everyone out there. In a way, they’re all winners; but in another, more accurate way, the DreamWorks animated comedy Megamind was the winner, taking a robust $47.6 million for first place. The news was also good for the runners-up: Though Due Date likely won’t be the breakout hit The Hangover was, the second pairing of director Todd Phillips and actor Zach Galifianakis (plus Robert Downey, Jr.) enjoyed a solid $33.5 million debut for second. In third, For Colored Girls, the first Tyler Perry movie to screen for critics—not that it did him much good—made nearly its entire budget back in one weekend, scoring $20.1 million for third. In semi-limited release, the Sean Penn-Naomi Watts drama Fair Game, about the Valerie Plame affair, nearly cracked the Top 10 despite being on only 46 screens, earning $15,200 per screen.

In limited release, the big winner was 127 Hours, Danny Boyle’s acclaimed-by-seemingly-everyone-but-us follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire, which had by far that biggest per screen average with an obscene $66,500 on four screens. (To put that number in perspective, it’s about five times higher than this week’s champ Megamind.) News wasn’t as positive for other indies, however. Poor Eliot Spitzer is having as much trouble getting attention in theaters as he is on his struggling CNN cable show: The suggestively subtitled Client 9: The Rise And Fall Of Eliot Spitzer won only $6,300 per screen. More disappointing still where the number for the acclaimed Jihad comedy Four Lions, which got Alamo Drafthouse’s new distribution shingle off to a rough start with $5,600 per screen.