Weekend Box Office: Everyone wants to see Gwyneth Paltrow die
In a stunning blow for racial harmony, The Help finally lost its No. 1 spot to Contagion, the all-star snuff film that provides a compelling argument for just preemptively setting everyone you come into contact with on fire, just to be safe. Steven Soderbergh’s thriller took in $23.1 million on a weekend that was devoted to providing some sense of closure to the events of 9/11, and American coped by watching their nation crumble under the weight of another unthinkable disaster—an astute counter-programming ploy that obviously paid off. And of course, you can’t discount the elemental thrill of watching fabulous movie stars get sick and die.
The weekend’s other big contender was Lionsgate’s Warrior, a film that’s done everything short of tracking down everyone who’s ever watched The Fighter on Netflix, then setting up a shuttle service to get people who enjoy those sorts of redemption-by-punching stories into theaters. Unfortunately, Warrior only managed around $5.6 million, less than half of The Fighter’s numbers, and even well below the 2009 Channing Tatum film Fighting that we’re pretty sure was just made up for the sake of comparison in this article. Warrior still has some of the strongest word-of-mouth of the fall, and plenty of people are championing it as an underdog for awards season, so there’s still a chance it could get off the canvas, and other sports metaphors that will continue to be used so long as it’s around.
And finally, congratulations are due to Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star, which not only achieved a rare 0-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes—with every critic in the country unleashing all the bile they’d been storing up throughout a mostly mediocre summer season in one mass, emetic purge—it also became one of the biggest mainstream flops in years, opening at 15th place at around $1.45 million. As Box Office Mojo notes, that’s less than half the numbers of other Happy Madison productions like Grandma’s Boy and Strange Wilderness, but perhaps more telling is the estimation that only around eight people saw it at each of its 1,500 locations. But like we said, congratulations are due, because it smartly opened the same weekend as the horror film Creature, which now has the fifth lowest-grossing opening on record by taking in a mere $331,000, an average of only six people per each of its 1,507 locations. On the other hand, all of these tiny groupings of Bucky Larson and Creature viewers have surely all become close friends now, so maybe this weekend really was about harmony and togetherness.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.