'Yes Man' gets approval from weekend filmgoers

Question: How do you know a weekend is a box-office dud for Hollywood?

Answer: When studio executives start every conversation by complaining about the weather.

Storms blanketing the country from the East Coast to the Midwest put a crimp in all three big openings this weekend. Left standing in first place was the Jim Carrey comedy "Yes Man," with $18.2 million in ticket sales, according to preliminary figures from Warner Bros.

The Will Smith drama "Seven Pounds," distributed by Sony Pictures, came in second with $16 million. Universal Studios' animated feature "The Tale of Despereaux," about a heroic mouse in the era of castles and dungeons, came in third with $10.5 million.

The top five were rounded out by two holdovers: 20th Century Fox's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," still strong in its second week with $10.2 million, and Warner's 4-week-old "Four Christmases," which broke $100 million in total box-office sales by adding $7.7 million in revenue this weekend.

Studio executives estimated that the weather cost them as much as 10% of their expected gross.

"The East Coast was just annihilated on Friday, and the Northwest was a disaster last night," said Dan Fellman, director of distribution at Warner Bros.

Nikki Rocco, Universal's director of domestic distribution, agreed. "There were very few markets that didn't have a weather issue," she said, arguing that "Despereaux," as G-rated family fare for the under-13 set, might have been especially vulnerable. "A lot of parents spent the weekend digging themselves out."

The Northeast was socked especially hard. Gross box-office receipts Friday were down 81% from a week earlier, said Chris Aronson, senior vice president for distribution at Fox -- and even down 9% from Thursday. By contrast, revenue was down only 1% from Friday to Friday in Los Angeles.

Still, even accounting for the weather, the weekend's results would probably have fallen well short of the pre-Christmas weekend last year, when the Nicolas Cage thriller "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" opened with $44.8 million in ticket sales. Gross box office this weekend was down 41% from the same weekend last year, according to Media by Numbers, which tracks box-office figures.

That's partly because both major live-action films that opened over the weekend were marketing challenges. Carrey, the star of "Yes Man," has lately looked like tarnished goods. His last signature comedy with a blockbuster opening was "Bruce Almighty," which took in $68 million on Memorial Day weekend in 2003.