'Expendables' Battle On, 'Vampires,' 'Piranha' Settle for Scraps
by Brandon Gray --- August 22, 2010
The weekend's five new nationwide releases were unimposing, allowing The Expendables to claim the top spot again with an estimated $16.5 million, though the muscle-bound action ensemble didn't show any further strength.
The Expendables retreated a typical 53 percent, and its wages grew to $64.9 million in ten days, doubling the final tallies of an average Jason Statham or Jet Li movie. The picture also held better than Sylvester Stallone's last movie, Rambo, and has handily out-grossed it. However, it lost further ground compared to Inglourious Basterds, which was off 49 percent to $19.3 million in its second weekend and had $73 million in the till at the same point last year.
Vampires Suck was the biggest grosser among new releases, draining an estimated $12.2 million from approximately 3,400 screens at 3,233 locations for a five-day haul of $18.6 million. With marketing that mostly honed in on Twilight and the vampire craze, the spoof's start was twice as much as the more arbitrary Disaster Movie's debut in August 2008. It also did more initial business than Dance Flick and Superhero Movie, though it fell short of Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans. Distributor 20th Century Fox's exit polling indicated that a whopping 72 percent of its audience was under 21 years old, and 55 percent was female, skewing much younger and less female than The Twilight Saga: Eclipse's opening.
Lottery Ticket scored a decent estimated $11.1 million on close to 2,200 screens at 1,973 locations, which was much greater than Love Don't Cost a Thing, The Longshots and The Cookout albeit not in the league of the Barbershop and Friday movies. Distributor Warner Bros. reported that 51 percent of the audience was female, 57 percent was 25 years and older, and 88 percent was black.
Piranha 3D took an estimated $10 million bite out of around 2,600 screens at 2,470 locations. Around 2,200 of those locations presented the picture in 3D, which accounted for 95 percent of the picture's business. That puts the intentionally cheesy gorefest's opening attendance on par with Splice from earlier this summer and at less than half of Snakes on a Plane and Lake Placid (and even less than Eight Legged Freaks), among comparable titles. Comedic horror generally doesn't grab much of an audience theatrically, and Piranha 3D's marketing used the same playbook as Snakes on a Plane and its ilk. Distributor The Weinstein Company's research suggested that 57 percent of the audience was male and 58 percent was 25 years and older.
Nanny McPhee Returns lost much of its predecessor's magic, making an estimated $8.3 million at 2,784 locations. The first Nanny McPhee debuted to $14.5 million at 1,995 locations more than four and a half years ago. Family sequels usually see sizable drop-offs from their predecessors, and Nanny McPhee Returns' plight was exacerbated by time and marketing that lived up to the movie's title and didn't give a compelling reason to see the movie.
The Switch delivered an estimated $8.1 million at 2,012 locations, which was about the same as Love Happens but more impotent than The Back-Up Plan. The comedy featuring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman had a largely nondescript advertising campaign, as if the marketers tried to hide the movie's potentially unappealing premise of a man switching the semen in a woman's artificial insemination with his own. Distributor Miramax's exit polling showed that 63 percent of the audience was female, 73 percent was over 25 years old and over 80 percent were couples.
