Despite its flagrant lousiness, the remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street easily won the weekend in its debut, taking $32.2 million to more than triple the next-best finisher. If there’s a silver lining, that total is actually about $8 million less than the similarly awful Friday The 13th remake—both from the same production company, Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes—and as with other craptacular horror films of its kind, its numbers stand to drop substantially in future weeks. Box office news wasn’t as charitable to Furry Vengeance, the eco-friendly Brendan Fraser slapstick comedy, which bowed to a pitiful $6.5 million—about the minimum that a kids’ movie can bilk out of undiscriminating parents. All will be forgotten by Friday, of course, when Iron Man 2 starts posting the gaudy numbers we can expect from the summer movie season.
In limited release, the Michael Caine vigilante picture Harry Brown raked in a solid $9,500 per screen on 19 screens, a total that perhaps seems a little weak in light of Caine’s stateside media blitz in support of it (and the Conservatives in the British election). Though only in five theaters, Nicole Holofcener’s latest, Please Give, made a whopping $25,600 per screen, suggesting a promising bit of counterprogramming as it rolls out in early summer.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo. (P.S. We did not enjoy A Nightmare On Elm Street.)