Weekend Box Office: How To Train Your Dragon Kicks Ass
Hard to decide which was the bigger news this weekend: That Kick-Ass, despite a wave of publicity and fanboy excitement, couldn’t quite hold onto first place, or that the film that beat it, the animated hit How To Train Your Dragon, has clawed back to #1 on its fourth week of release. Whichever way your slice it, How To Train Your Dragon eked out a win with $20 million to Kick-Ass’ $19.7 million, showing the remarkable staying power that’s kept its going strong past its relatively modest opening weekend numbers. (Modest in comparison with DreamWorks’ last effort, Monsters Vs. Aliens, anyway.) For its part, Kick-Ass doesn’t have that high a budgetary mountain to climb, but expectations were greater for the pre-summer superhero movie, which drew wildly polarized reviews from critics and fell short of the hype generated by Ain’t It Cool News’ “Buttnumbathon” screening. The week’s other wide release, Neil LaBute’s remake of the three-year-old sleeper hit Death At A Funeral, bowed in fourth with a very healthy $17 million in relation to its frugal budget. As Nathan Rabin wrote in his review, we can look forward to the Hispanic remake in 2013.