The Box-Office Top Five
#1 "The Final Destination" ($15.4 million)
#2 "Inglourious Basterds" ($15 million)
#3 "All About Steve" ($13.9 million)
#4 "Gamer" ($11.2 million)
#5 "District 9" ($9 million)
Though this Labor Day weekend was not the end for "All About Steve," it wasn't exactly an excellent start either. The Bradley Cooper/Sandra Bullock-starring romantic comedy hit theaters over the three-day weekend only to be impaled by the death-dealing "The Final Destination," which ruled the box office for its second weekend in a row at $15.4 million.
But the victory of "Final Destination" over "Steve" wasn't a sure thing when the latter kicked off the holiday weekend with a Friday opening of $3.55 million, only $30,000 less than "Destination." By Monday's end, however, moviegoers proved their bloody appetites by awarding first place to the 3-D horror film and second place to Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," which earned $15 million over the course of the weekend.
Although Labor Day portends a notoriously slow weekend for movie theaters, the $13.9 million intake for "All About Steve" is nonetheless surprising given Bullock's and Cooper's earlier summer successes with "The Proposal" and "The Hangover," respectively. Still, R-rated fare tends to be the favorite for the holiday, with Rob Zombie's 2007 "Halloween" holding the record for the all-time best Labor Day debut at $26.3 million — a record that "Halloween II" clearly didn't match with its sixth place $7 million weekend.
One gore fest that "Steve" managed to topple was "Gamer," the Gerard Butler-starring film that also debuted on Friday, with a disappointing weekend total of $11.2 million. On the bright side, "Gamer" directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's 2006 release, "Crank," only earned $10.4 million in its opening weekend — also during Labor Day — and still managed to produce a sequel. But "Crank: High Voltage," released in April of this year, fared even worse at the box office, leaving Neveldine and Taylor with two theatrical flops in 2009.
The weekend's other new release, "Extract," barely cracked the top 10 with $5.3 million, demonstrating that the combination of director Mike Judge, actors Jason Bateman and Ben Affleck, and cameo spokespeople Beavis and Butthead couldn't overcome a limited run across 1,611 theaters.
Upcoming Releases
Shane Acker's computer-animated post-apocalyptic flick "9" kicks off the week's new releases on Wednesday, with comic book adaptation "Whiteout," horror flick "Sorority Row" and Tyler Perry's "I Can Do Bad All by Myself" rounding out the rest of the weekend.
Check out everything we've got on "The Final Destination,""Inglourious Basterds" and "All About Steve."
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Guinness World Record broken at Leeds Festival‘The Final Destination’ Kills In 3-D At Box Office
