#1 "A Nightmare on Elm Street" ($32.2 million)
#2 "How to Train Your Dragon" ($10.8 million)
#3 "Date Night" ($7.6 million)
#4 "The Back-Up Plan" ($7.2 million)
#5 "Furry Vengeance" ($6.5 million)
Warner Bros. and New Line dreamed up a winning formula as "A Nightmare on Elm Street" won first place at the box office this weekend. The villainous Freddy Krueger's first big-screen outing in seven years carved an impressive $32.2 million chunk out of moviegoers' wallets, securing victory by a margin of over $20 million past the next closest competitor.
With Jackie Earle Haley starring as the scarred-and-clawed horror icon, "Nightmare" earned approximately $9,665 per screen over 3,332 locations this past weekend and $1.6 million from midnight showings on Thursday alone. As a result, the movie made back nearly the entirety of its reported $35 million production budget. Whether or not the movie can repeat that success in the coming weeks is another story, as reviews for "Nightmare" have been less than dreamy with a 14 percent fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com.
But "Elm Street" wasn't the true critical nightmare of the weekend, a distinction that belonged to Summit Entertainment's "Furry Vengeance." The family comedy stars Brendan Fraser as a real estate developer seeking to convert a forest into a major housing development, prompting the titular revenge scheme from the forest's furry inhabitants. Fraser's latest bowed in fifth place with only $6.5 million in 2,997 locations. Adding insult to injury is the film's 2 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the review aggregator's all-time lowest rankings.
Holdovers "How to Train Your Dragon," "Date Night" and "The Back-Up Plan" finished the weekend in second, third and fourth places respectively.
Comic book adaptations "The Losers" and "Kick-Ass" dropped off by 36.2 percent and 52.4 percent respectively, but comics flourished on an international level as the foreign release of "Iron Man 2" earned the Marvel Studios sequel a reported $100.2 million overseas.
Upcoming Releases:
Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau's "Iron Man 2" is the only major wide release on schedule for next weekend, virtually guaranteeing victory for the Marvel Studios superhero flick.
Check out everything we've got on "A Nightmare on Elm Street."
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