The Box-Office Top Five:
#1 "Alice in Wonderland" ($34.5 million)
#2 "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" ($21.8 million)
#3 "The Bounty Hunter" ($21 million)
#4 "Repo Men" ($6.2 million)
#5 "She's Out of My League" ($6 million)
Though the subject matter is more than a little bit wacky, there's nothing unusual about the continued success story of "Alice in Wonderland," director Tim Burton's 3-D exploration of the bizarre world established by author Lewis Carroll. "Wonderland" topped the box-office charts for its third weekend in a row, easily beheading the surrounding competition with a $34.5 million intake. After three weeks in theaters, the fantasy film has earned a walloping $565.8 million across the globe.
Of the other box-office battlers, only newcomers "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and "The Bounty Hunter" came close to challenging "Wonderland" for cinematic supremacy, but both films were too busy contending with each other to make a dent on Burton's fantasy feature. Throughout the weekend, Fox's family comedy and Sony's romantic comedy alternated back and forth between second and third place, but "Wimpy Kid" ultimately won out over Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler's "Bounty Hunter." By Sunday's conclusion, "Wimpy Kid" earned back its entire production budget plus a profit of nearly $8 million, while "Bounty Hunter" cracked just over half of its $40 million budget.
"Repo Men," the science-fiction thriller starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber, limped through the finish line in fourth place. The $6.2 million performance is a tough result given the Universal film's $32 million budget, but it's hardly surprising given the movie's gruesome subject matter and mostly negative reviews.
While "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "The Bounty Hunter" and "Repo Men" had the widest releases of the weekend's newcomers, they weren't the only films debuting at the box office. In just 244 theaters, Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning's "The Runaways" earned an impressive $803,000. Ben Stiller's "Greenberg," meanwhile, enjoyed the weekend's highest per-screen average at $40,000 per three theaters, for a total of $120,000. Anchor Bay Films' "City Island" performed admirably as well with $35,000 from only two locations.
Upcoming Releases
Next weekend, moviegoers can travel back to the past with MGM's "Hot Tub Time Machine," or they can sit down for school with "How to Train Your Dragon," DreamWorks' 3-D animated fantasy film. Sean Bean's "Ca$h" and Amanda Seyfried's "Chloe" also open in limited release.
Check out everything we've got on "Alice in Wonderland."
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