Jim Carrey's 'Yes Man' finds assurance at top of box office
'Yes Man' takes in $18.2 million, Will Smith's 'Seven Pounds' $16 million and the animated 'Tale of Despereaux' $10.5 million on a weekend of bad weather across the country.
Question: How do you know a weekend is a box-office dud for Hollywood?
Answer: When studio execs 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's 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: Fox's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," holding strong in its second week with $10.2 million, and Warner's four-week-old "Four Christmases," which broke $100 million in total box office 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," she said.
The Northeast was socked especially hard. Gross box office this Friday was down 81% from Friday a week earlier, said Chris Aronson, senior vice president for distribution at Fox -- and even down 9% from Thursday. By contrast, gross was down only 1% Friday-to-Friday in Los Angeles.
Still, even accounting for the weather, this weekend 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 for the top 12 films this weekend was down 44% 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 opening this 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.
