They say if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t no one happy. But if a psychotic maternal specter can be made happy through the tabulation of box office receipts, we should have nothing to worry about.
Mama, the creepy PG-13 thriller starring the ever-busy Jessica Chastain, brought in an estimated $28.1 million (not, obviously, counting the potential cash from today’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday) to lay claim to cinema’s top spot over the weekend. Whether the titular character uses her share to buy a heaping helping of bugs and berries with which to feed orphaned children is anyone’s guess.
With the victory, Chastain has the weird distinction of pushing her Osama bin Laden-hunting doppelganger off the podium. Zero Dark Thirty, also starring Chastain, tumbled to No. 2 in its second week in wide release, earning $17.6 million.
Silver Linings Playbook is the first Chastain-free movie in this week’s countdown (unless she did some work as a key grip or something). This off-kilter love story twirled its way to $11.4 million and the No. 3 slot in its first week of wide release.
The battle for fourth place degenerated into a classic East Coast/West Coast rumble between Gangster Squad (a stylish, noirist look at Los Angeles-based crimefighting and corruption) and Broken City (a not-so-stylish but still noirist look at New York-based crimefighting and corruption). The holdover Gangster Squad, with its $9.1-million estimate, looks like it has a narrow lead over newcomer Broken City ($9 mil), but we’ll see when the final tally is, um, tallied.
While the box office may have looked a little muddled this weekend, it definitively told us that folks really don’t have much interest in seeing a former California governor in the movies anymore. The Last Stand, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comeback performance, earned just $6.3 million en route to a 10th place finish—suggesting its title was more true than its makers had hoped.
Final figures update: 1. Mama, $28.4 million; 2. Zero Dark Thirty, $15.8 million; 3. Silver Linings Playbook, $10.8 million; 4. Gangster Squad, $8.6 million; 5. Broken City, $8.3 million The Last Stand finished ninth with $6.3 million.
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