Weekend Box Office: To the Wimpy go the spoils

For the third straight weekend, Alice In Wonderland easily dispatched all challengers to top the box office, adding another $34.5 million to a healthy domestic gross that’s reached $265.8 million and counting. That doesn’t mean the weekend was a bust for the newcomers, however, despite middling-to-poor notices for all three. Based on the popular illustrated children’s books, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid eked out a second plash finish with $21.8 million, a strong number that looks even stronger when measured against its frugal $15 million budget. ($7 million of which went to the manufacture of synthetic boogers.) Wimpy Kid’s take was only $800,000 more than the $21 million haul for the Jennifer Aniston-Gerard Butler rom-com The Bounty Hunter, which we’re guessing most people saw out of force of habit. No doubt it’ll turn a nice little profit, too, meaning Hollywood will just keep on churning out more like it. (Stop encouraging them, America!) As for Jude Law organ collecting movies, however, Repo Men seems likely to be the first and the last: At $6.2 million, the film came in a distant fourth, and would be considered a bomb by any measure.

In limited release, the music biopic The Runaways opened poorly, taking $3,290 per screen on 244 screens for a paltry $800,000. That continues a losing streak for upstart distributor Apparition, which also took (mystifyingly) low grosses for critical favorites like Bright Star and Black Dynamite. The dark new Noah Baumbach movie Greenberg fared much better, with $40,000 per screen on three screens, though it remains to be seen how far its acidic comedic vision will travel.

For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.

 
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