BEE MOVIE achieved a rare feet this weekend: After making its debut the previous week at the #2 position, it buzzed past AMERICAN GANGSTER to fly into the #1 slot during its sophomore session. The computer-animated fantasy-comedy (about a talking bee) earned $25.57-million during its second week of release, raising its two week total to the grand number of $71.78-million. (THE POLAR EXPRESS achieved a similar feat, starting out slow, then turning into a blockbuster as audiences embraced the film.)
The weekend’s big fantasy film debut, FRED CLAUSE (a comedy about Santa’s ne’er-do-well brother) had to settle for a third-place debut, earning $18.52-million worth of Christmas candy in 3,603 theatres.
The weekend’s other widely released genre film barely found its way into the Top Ten: The violent thriller P2, playing on 2,131 screens, earned only $2.08-million, landing in ninth place.
Meanwhile, the After Dark Horrorfest, in limited release, earned $450,000 according to Box Office Mojo. That represents a steep decline from last year, when the first edition of the fest had an opening weekend of $2.31-million. This year, the “8 Films to Die For” are screening in only 323 theatres, as opposed to 488, but that is not enough to explain the drop: last year’s per screen average was a reasonably healthy $4,735; this year’s is an anemic $1,393. With numbers like this, the 2007 Horrorfest may be the last one.
As for the weekend’s other genre titles…
SAW IV slid from #3 to # 6 in its third weekend of release, slicing its way through $4.95-million in ticket sales. The total now stands at $58.03-million, just shy of the $58.14-million earned by Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN remake but still short of the $70+million total of 1408.
30 DAYS OF NIGHT fell on $2.17-million – good enough for sixth place, down two slots from last week. Now four weeks old, the iflm has sucked $37.4-million from theatre-goers.
Read the complete Top Ten here.