Technically, the holiday weekend is still chugging along. With today being President’s Day, the entertainment industry is hoping that scads of holiday-taking lagabouts will spend the day at the local multiplex, watching movie after movie and subsisting on nothing but Milk Duds and Diet Coke.
Alas, it is not a holiday for me. So out of sheer spite, I’m going to jump the gun and talk about movies. Because really, the big films this week have made enough cash already.
For the second week in a row, four films nearly cleared an estimated $20 million (a rare happening, as we talked about last week)—and that’s before we take into account today’s holiday haul. Safe House and The Vow, two holdovers from last week, switched slots this time around: Denzel Washington’s R-rated thriller came in at No. 1 with $23.8 million, with the frothy Valentine’s Day romance close behind with $23.1 mil.
I’m rooting that both films’ makers combine efforts and make a joint sequel—a movie featuring an AWOL government assassin who loses his memory and falls in love and can’t for the life of him figure out why he’s got all those state secrets squirreled away in his bureau. They could call it The Vow House. Or The Bourne Identity.
But I digress.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance—the first newcomer on the list—burned little rubber on its way to a third-place, $22.1 million take. Prognosticators had expected far more from the demonic motorcycle rider, given that the first Ghost Rider scared up $45.4 million during its opening weekend five years ago—and it managed that without a bevy of 3-D screens to goose the gross. One might say that this Ghost Rider flamed out.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island dipped to fourth place and $19.9 million. Another newcomer, the romantic spy caper This Means War, closed out the top five with a $17.4 million weekend—disappointing, perhaps, but it did perform better than the animé-flavored The Secret World of Arrietty. Its $6.5-million, ninth-place performance made it something of a box-office secret unto itself.
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