Weekend Box-Office: August 5-7, 2011

Those
damned dirty apes are back…

When the original remake of
PLANET OF THE APES was released back in 2001 (directed by Tim
Burton and starring Mark Wahlberg), the film grossed $68.5 on its
opening weekend and despite "negative word of mouth",
still ended up grossing $180M when all was said and done. The
latest revival of the series entitled RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE
APES has received plenty of "good word of mouth", along
with with a surprising 81%
positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a 7.3/10
average on Movie Fan Central. Well, all that good stuff paid
off as the film exceeded expectations by about $20M and ended up
with an impressive $54M in its first weekend of release.

Compared to most "summer
blockbusters", the film wasn’t too expensive to produce
($90M), so if all goes well over the next few weeks, RISE OF THE
APES can end up being one of the summer’s biggest surprise hits.
Unfortunately for last week’s #1 movie, COWBOYS & ALIENS, the
"good word of mouth" wasn’t as strong as the film lost
57% of its audience from last weekend and ended up in 3rd place
this time around. THE SMURFS, on the other hand, held up much
stronger and remained in 2nd place for the second week in a row
and have now grossed over $76M over its first 10 days of release.

The other new release of the
weekend, THE CHANGE-UP, didn’t fare too well with a 4th place
opening and only $13M. Despite R-rated comedies faring very well
this summer (HANGOVER 2, BRIDESMAIDS, HORRIBLE BOSSES and BAD
TEACHER), it seemed as though audiences had either had enough of
the raunchy comedies for now, or simply weren’t interested in the
ol’ "body switching" premise. This result sucks a little
worse for Ryan Reynolds as his GREEN LANTERN superhero flick was
also one of the few comic book movies not to succeed this summer.

BTW, even though most of us tend to bitch about
remakes and sequels (well, mostly remakes), it’s interesting to
note that from the top
10 movies on the 2011 top-grossing movies chart, 8 are indeed
sequels/prequels (TRANSFORMERS 3, HARRY POTTER 7, THE HANGOVER 2,
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4, FAST FURIOUS 5, CARS 2, KUNG FU PANDA
2 and X-MEN: FIRST CLASS). The only 2 films in the top 10 that are
wholly original are THOR in 7th place and BRIDESMAIDS in 8th
place. Doesn’t bode well for "original summer movies"
for the next few years, I would assume. It’s to note that the
latest HARRY POTTER flick is only $2M behind the latest
TRANSFORMERS movie for the top spot in 2011 and will likely
surpass it in the coming week.

And while films like ZOOKEEPER ($74M) and CARS 2
($184M) were bounced from the top 10 this week, HORRIBLE BOSSES
managed to crack the $100M mark in its 5th week of release, while
CAPTAIN AMERICA continued to bring in the dollars and is now
creeping up on the $150M mark, after only three weeks of release.

Next week sees the release of THE
HELP based on the very popular book (doesn’t seem like a
"summer release" kinda movie to me, but what do I
know?), 30
MINUTES OF LESS starring Jesse Eisenberg along with a
bunch of funny peeps including Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari and Nick
Swardson, as well as FINAL
DESTINATION 5, the latest installment in the popular
horror franchise. I believe the next one will be called FINAL
DESTINATION 6: THE FINALIST! Since next weekend’s films don’t seem
like major blockbusters, this weekend’s poll question revolves
around those damned Apes movies. Specifically, which one is your
favorite? VOTE
HERE!!!