Who won at the box office this weekend?
The weather did it.
That was the spin from Hollywood as one high-profile film (see Jim Carrey’s Yes Man) after another (see Will Smith’s Seven Pounds) landed with a thud at the weekend box office.
“I’m of the philosophy any real moviegoer would walk through a blizzard to see the movie they wanted to see,” Exhibitor Relations’ Jeff Bock said today.
Certainly the weather, which was nasty, especially in the East, didn’t detour the art-house crowd from The Wrestler, Gran Torino, Doubt and Frost/Nixon, all of which did well in limited release.
Of course, maybe conditions were more brutal at multiplexes showing Yes Man. The grosses sure were.
On paper, yes, Yes Man finished No. 1 in the weekend standings. But the comedy’s estimated $18.2 million Friday-Sunday gross was down 40 percent from the take of last weekend’s No. 1 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and down 60 percent from the take of the same weekend’s No. 1 film from last year, National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
For Carrey, Bock said, Yes Man was “a return to form that just did not pan out—this opened worse than The Cable Guy [$19.8 million debut in 1996].”
Yes Man came up short when judged against nearly any classic Carrey comedy, from Bruce Almighty ($68 million) to Yes Man’s spiritual forerunner, Liar Liar ($31.4 million).
For Smith, the most reliable of box-office draws, Seven Pounds, Bock predicted, will be the star’s first movie since 2001’s Ali to fail to gross at least $100 million overall.
The drama, from the same director as Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness, debuted with $16 million, down about $10 million from Happyness’ opening on nearly the same weekend in December 2006.
