Takers took the box office by surprise (Aug.27-29)

by Alex on September 2, 2010 · 0 comments

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Not only did Takers win the weekend and blew sky high even the most optimistic expectations, but it was also in one of the closest races for the lead we’ve had and it wasn’t decided until the final numbers came out on Monday. Ultimately Takers, with $20.5 million managed to beat The Last Exorcism, another movie that flew past expectations with $20.3 million.

So overall it wasn’t a bad weekend and I was dead wrong about both Takers and The Last Exorcism. So I’m eating my words a lot sooner then I was expecting.

With Takers first and The Last Exorcism second, there was nothing left for 3rd place then the winner of the previous two weekends, The Expendables with $9.5 million. This cheesy throwback to 80′s action movies stands at $84 million in 19 days and Stallone must feel really proud just about now. Unfortunately there are no accurate international numbers for this film as of yet because it has more then a few distributors across the world.

In 4th place Eat Pray Love continues to follow The Expendables closely, this time with $6.8 million (it dropped 43.7% from a weekend ago compared to 43.8% for The Expendables).

In 5th place The Other Guys pulled another great weekend with $6.2 million and managed to pass the $100 million mark in 26 days, Salt did it in 23.

Vampires Suck keeps sucking in 6th place with $5.2 million while Inception passed $270 million in 45 days. I think it’s safe to say it won’t make it to $300 million, unfortunately. Still, can’t say $658.6 million worldwide is something you see every day so yeah.

Nanny McPhee Returns, The Switch and Piranha 3D round out the top 10 with $4.7, $4.5 and $4.3 million, staying strangely close to one another.

Finally I have to mention one little beast called Avatar: Special Edition. For a title like that, it wasn’t so special after all, grossing only $4 million over the weekend for 11th place. But considering this is a re-release of a movie that came out on DVD months ago, and for what, 8 more minutes? The DVD that is coming out in November is going to have 16 minutes, so considering that, $4 million ain’t so bad.