Top Shelf at the Box Office

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Wolverine decimated the competition this week. But what is surprising, atleast to me, is the woeful performance of the other new films to release this week. I'm sure a lot of that can be attributed to the phenomenal take from Wolverine, but I'm willing to bet that even more of it was bad marketing and awful word of mouth.

1. X-men Origins: Wolverine- $87M

Duh. Wolverine clawed his way through McConaughey and Idris Alba pretty damn easily, on it's way to a blowout $87M opening. While that's a phenomenal start, let's look a little bit further into it. This opening actually is worse than the critically reviled X-men: The Last Stand, which opened at over $100. It's worse than X-2, the best of the X-men franchise(atleast when adjusted for inflation). And it pales in comparison to last year's Iron Man, which opened at roughly $99M. Anybody wanna hazard a guess at which character is more popular? Right. It ain't the guy in the metal suit. So, why was Wolverine's opening lower than expected? It could have something to do with the film leaking out a month early. It could have to do with people feeling like this is just the 4th X-men film and not a big deal. It could have to do with the ambiguous tone of the marketing. Whatever. My thought is that based on the bad word of mouth this film is receiving(rightly deserved), it will get hammered in the coming weeks. It doesn't help that an event like Star Trek is right around the corner.

2. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past- $15.3M

Let's get one thing out in the open: I saw this film, and enjoyed it for the most part. But in terms of McConaughey openings, this one falls way short of his previous efforts such as Fool's Gold, The Wedding Planner, and other awful excuses for him to remove his shirt. Actually, he's almost totally clothed throughout the duration of this movie, which might explain the lack of female support at the box office. This was clearly marketed as more of a redemptive comedy, and less the usual blatant attempt at male cheesecake. It could be because Jennifer Garner doesn't really lend herself to that type of movie. Whatever the reason, this one failed to impress. Too bad, really.

3. Obsessed- $12.2M/$47M

Two weeks in and apparently there's still a market for a movie which has two hot women wrestling eachother in a sweaty brawl that's just begging for someone to squirt oil(or creamed corn) all over them. Oh, and it's also slightly racist. Who knew people would wanna pay for something like that? More than once, no less! Actually, it kicked away nearly 60% of it's previous intake but still the studio has to be happy with the performance thus far.

4. 17 Again- $6.36M/$48.5M

5. Monsters vs. Aliens- $5.8M/$182M

As predicted, MvA is flourishing thanks to IMAX. Chances are this will be the final week of numbers like this, with Star Trek due to take over the super-sized screens this weekend. MvA actually was not the only 3-D animated feature in theaters this week, but the other one did so poorly that it's barely worth mentioning.

6. The Soloist- $5.6M/$18.1M

By all rights this film shouldn't be anywhere near the top 10 it's so bad. However it suffered the smallest 2nd week drop of them all, only whistling away about 40% of it's audience. Even so, 18M for a supposed Oscar contender with a heavyweight cast has to be a letdown.

7. Earth- $4.18M/$21.8M

You can't expect people to keep coming to a documentary heavily marketed around Earth Day when most of us don't even remember when Earth Day was anymore. It was last week, right? In terms of a nature doc like this that's still an impressive tally.

8. Fighting- $4.17M/$17.5M

The Channing Tatum brawler appears to be fighting a losing battle, as it dropped nearly 60% from last week. Perhaps he'll have better luck with GI Joe.

9. Hannah Montana: The Movie- $4.08M/$70.9M

10. State of Play-$3.66M/$30.9M

Also: The 3-D animated space opera, The Battle for Terra, crashed landed at a majorly disappointing 12th place this week. While the trailers were interesting, the TV spots made some critical mistakes. First, the animation looked bland at best. Second, they focused too much on the "humans as evil warmongers" angle. Not exactly gonna draw people in with that one. Third, it was almost as if the studio knew the only real draw for this thing was it's 3-D, which makes some sense considering they added the 3-D after the fact to shore up what was already a vanilla looking cartoon.

Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control debuted at a paltry 3 theaters, but pulled in an average of over $18,000 per site, which ranks at second best among all movies this week. It should be expanding to more theaters in the coming weeks.