What started as an episode of the HBO series Sex And The City and then became a best-selling advice book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo (and then Behrendt's blink and you missed it TV talk show), has now begat the major studio movie He's Just Not That Into You with an ensemble cast of famous and beautiful under-age-40 actresses playing for laughs their desperation to understand men not worthy of them in order to fulfill ambitions for love and marriage and babies. It's a definite throwback for women's pics among which the most memorable and successful often center on a message of female empowerment rather than submission to male whims. (As critic Manohla Dargis points out so drolly in her New York Times review of HJNTIY, "Where have you gone, Thelma And Louise?") Then again, this pic is from New Line/Warner Bros, a lethal combination when it comes to the body count in male action movies, but also the same duo that released SATC. Yet before I continue on my soapbox after having seen the film, I have to look at its financial reality: women turned out in droves for He's Just Not That Into You -- a staggering 80% of the audience was female -- and made it the No. 1 movie by a wide margin in North America this weekend. So it's hard to argue with success like that. It wasn't the runaway female box office phenom of Sex And The City, but many big city theaters reported IJNTIY sellouts by early afternoon for Friday night -- an indicator of "girls night out -- let's go to see this movie" -- because of the savvy marketing of Sue Kroll and her team. Unlike SATC, its grosses actually increased for Saturday, by 5%, to finish the weekend with a bigger-than-expected $27.4 million. Warner Bros noted it was the biggest 3-day February opening ever for a romantic comedy. "We are well positioned going into Presidents Weekend. And with Valentines Day falling on a Saturday, it will be a huge plus at the box office for this film," a WB exec told me.
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1. He's Just Not That Into You (New Line/Warner Bros) OPENER
$10.4M Friday, $11M Saturday, [3,175 theaters] Weekend $27.4M
2. Taken (Fox) $6.2M Fri, $9M Sat, [3,184] Wkd $20.3M, Cume $53.3M
3. Coraline (Focus) OPENER $4.3M Fri, $6.5M Sat, [2,298] Wkd $16.3M
4. Pink Panther (Sony) OPENER $4M Fri, $6M Sat, [3,243] Wkd $12M
5. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) $2.7M Fri, $5M Sat, Wkd $11M, Cume $97M
6. Push (Summit) OPENER $3.5M Fri, $4.2M Sat [2,313] Wkd $10.2M
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Sunday, February 8, 2009
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