The Box-Office Top Five
#1 "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" ($24.6 million)
#2 "Surrogates" ($15 million)
#3 "Fame" ($10 million)
#4 "The Informant!" ($6.9 million)
#5 "Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself" ($4.8 million)
Who needs a world where human beings can exist vicariously through robots when there's a sky filled with meatballs to enjoy? Moviegoers decisively chose the delicious rain shower, as "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" dominated the box office for the second weekend in a row with a $24.6 million intake, only $6 million less than what it made during its debut weekend.
While the folks at Sony Pictures Animation have plenty of reasons to celebrate, the outcome is significantly more "cloudy" for "Surrogates," Disney's Bruce Willis-starring science-fiction flick, which earned only $15 million. Based on the Top Shelf Productions comic book of the same name, "Surrogates" was expected by many box-office watchdogs to rule the weekend. Despite a close battle on Friday evening — "Meatballs" led "Surrogates" by less than $1 million going into Saturday morning — the weekend matinees roped in the family crowd for the animated picture, giving it enough of a boost to surpass "Surrogates" by almost $10 million.
But "Surrogates" wasn't the only newcomer to fall victim to the ever-edible "Meatballs." In third place, "Fame" managed only $10 million over the weekend, despite its family appeal, undoubtedly losing that crowd to the buzz-worthy animated competition. Like "Surrogates," "Fame" might have some trouble trying to recoup its $25 million budget.
Coming in third and fourth place were "The Informant!" and "Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself," respectively. Both films were released earlier this month and continue to do decent business, with the Matt Damon-starring dark comedy likely to move into the profit margin this week.
The weekend held plenty of other new releases that didn't quite crack the top five. "Pandorum" earned a disappointing $4.4 million, likely due to low-key marketing and mediocre word of mouth. Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" and the Audrey Tautou-starring "Coco Before Chanel" performed quite impressively given their incredibly limited theatrical runs: At four and five theaters apiece, "Capitalism" and "Coco" earned $240,000 and $177,000, respectively.
Upcoming Releases
Moore's aforementioned new doc, a scathing examination of America's financial system, gets a much wider release next weekend, putting it in direct competition with Drew Barrymore's "Whip It," the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man" and the Ricky Gervais-starring "The Invention of Lying."
Check out everything we've got on "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,""Surrogates" and "Fame."
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