Unusually, the top two films at the US box office this weekend were also the two movies showing on the fewest number of screens out of all the films in the top 10. However between the CG animated movie 9 and Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself, it was the latter which won the race with a very decent $24 million. The success of Perry’s movies are particularly impressive because they’re low budget, have gotten so pilloried by ciritics that they’re not even shown in advance anymore, and don’t really sell overseas (no Perry movie has been released in Britain since his first movie flopped over here), yet there’s a new one every year and each time it tops the box office. It’s largely because he fully taps into and resonates with the female African American audience in a way few films or filmmakers have managed to do.
In second place was 9 with $10.9m, which probably isn’t has high as some had hoped for. However it isn’t bad for a movie showing on fewer than half the screens of the number 3 film (Inglorious Basterds) and didn’t have a massive marketing push. Produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmanbetov, the Shane Acker directed CG movie may also have looked a bit intense for the youngest cinemagoers, with a group of living burlap toy being chased by giant machines in a post-apocalyptic world. However some good reviews and the possibility of spreading onto more screens will hopefully help the movie in the coming weeks.
The other new entries in the list were Sorority Row and Whiteout, neither of which were screened for critics and neither of which did that well with audiences, making just over $5 million each, for a fifth and sixth place finish. While a year or so ago, it really didn’t seem to matter if there weren’t any reviews for this sort of film, as teen viewers would turn up anyway, recently it does seem to be that audiences are getting wiser, as more and more films that would have probably done okay last year, have tanked this year after people realised that no reviews normally means it’s an awful film.
There was some good news for Inglorious Basterds, which crossed the $100 million mark over the weekend, and is now likely to overtake Pulp Fiction in the next few days as Tarantino’s highest grossing movie in the US. However nobody else had much to cheer about, as The Final Destination dropped from first place all the way to number five, Gamer dropped to number 10 in only its second weekend and everyone else had a farily slow weekend as well.
Take a look below for the full US box office top 10 for the weekend of September 11th-13th, 2009.
Rank | Title | Weekend Gross (millions) | Total Gross to date (millions) |
1 | Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself | $24.0 | $24.0 |
2 | 9 | $10.8 | $15.2 |
3 | Inglourious Basterds | $6.5 | $104.3 |
4 | All About Steve | $5.8 | $21.8 |
5 | The Final Destination | $5.5 | $58.2 |
6 | Sorority Row | $5.2 | $5.2 |
7 | Whiteout | $5.1 | $5.1 |
8 | District 9 | $3.6 | $108.5 |
9 | Julie & Julia | $3.3 | $85.3 |
10 | Gamer | $3.1 | $16.1 |