The dynamic of the weekend was set up as adversarial all week.
Will the girls beat the boys? Will the boys punch the girls? No wonder we are still so fucked up about gender at the movies. If we didn’t set the movies up as an us vs. them dynamic maybe men would see more movies about women.
So the news is that The Expendables starring the 1980s scored $35 million and Eat Pray Love (EPL) grossed $23.7. The budget for The Expendables seems to be between $70 and 80 million and the budget for EPL is about $60 million.
EPL clearly drew a majority of its audience from women – 72% of audience for EPL was female; 56% were over 35 which means that a lot of younger women saw it too. IndieWIRE says that “64% of the under-35s were between age 17 and 29.”
While some would think that $23.7 million for a Julia Roberts flick seems low, don’t be fooled. The films that starred Julia and not a cacophony of other folks had pretty similar numbers (some lower, some higher.)
Here are the numbers:
Mona Lisa Smile- $11 million
America’s Sweetheart- $30 million
Erin Brokovich – $28 million
Runaway Bride- $35 million
Notting Hill – $21 million
and Pretty Woman (which of course was more Richard Gere’s flick) – $11 million. That film went on to make $178 million.
I’m thinking that EPL will play through the end of the summer and will do fine at the box office.
Other notes from the weekend:
The Kids Are All Right directed and co-written by Lisa Cholodenko has grossed $16,731,058 making it the top specialty grossing film of the year.
Cairo Time written and directed by Ruba Nadda grossed $80,903, on 17 screens and will expand to the top ten markets next weekend.
Winter’s Bone directed at co-written by Debra Granik has now played for 10 weeks for a total of $4,859,165.
Box Office: “Kingdom” Comes With Decent Debut; “Kids” Hits 2010 High (IndieWIRE)
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I saw Scott Pilgrim and Cairo Time this weekend, so I think I opted out of the big battle completely. Enjoyed both immensely though.
I thought the big news on the numbers for Expendables v. EPL was the number of women at Expendables. Wasn’t it thirty something percent of the box office total? That’s what put Expendables over the top. Women enjoy action films too.
Hopefully Hollywood won’t assume that those women were just there as dates.
I’ve been reading posts as if a 23 million dollar opening for a film is horrible. As far as comparing it to her other films, I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison due to the rise in ticket prices. 23 million is close to what I expected 20 million, which seems respectable. It opened close to Meryl’s last film, which I think made well over 100M at the box office. time will tell how well it does. The film was ok and pleasant, but not ground breaking or meaningful as I kind of hoped it would be. My guess is it was made safe and the lead character made to be sold by Julia Roberts not the character so much. No crime there, lots of films do the same, just disappointing for this viewer because I thought the book had a lot of potential as a film.
I couldn’t make it to see EPL this weekend but I’ll contribute to the box office the next. I’m not aRyan Murphy fan but I’ll give this a shot for Julia Roberts.
I’m glad to see that Angelina Jolie’s Salt passed the $100 million mark
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