Weekend Box Office: Endangered cerulean macaws feast on Scream 4's entrails
Since kicking off its run of not-quite-Pixar-but-it’ll-do animated hits with Ice Age in 2002, Blue Sky Studios, Fox’s CGI animation arm, has separated just-enthusiastic-enough families from their entertainment dollar with remarkable consistency. It’s first five features—three Ice Age movies, Robots, and Horton Hears A Who!—have grossed a minimum of a quarter-billion dollars worldwide, and with Rio, its totally-okay Brazilian birdie adventure, the hits would appear to keep on coming. With a healthy $40 million, Rio scored the highest weekend gross of any film released so far this year. That left Scre4m, the first Scream movie in 11 years, to slip quietly into second place with $19.3 million, a decent number by horror sequel standards, but hardly the bonanza some expected of this venerable series. On far fewer screens—707 to be exact—Robert Redford’s The Conspirator bored audiences to the tune of $3.9 million for ninth place, suggesting that history and civics lessons along the lines of it and Redford’s last bomb, Lions For Lambs, are not quickening the pulses of the American moviegoing public.