Weekend Box Office: More Mall Cop Plus Slumdog Millions

Now there’s money for “Slumdog Millionaire” as well as awards. Have fun, kids. 

Okay, let’s just dispense with the niceties and get right to the point:

[numbers courtesy of Variety]

The most important number on this list is the five spot, where “Slumdog Millionaire,” which has toiled for months in very limited release, landed after expanding to 1,411 showings. See what 10 Oscar nominations can do for you? (Though we should note that “Gran Torino,” with no big noms, kept its place in the top five quite comfortably. It’s good to be Clint.)

With the new movies, “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans”, probably the weekend’s biggest new release, finished so close in box office take to “Mall Cop” that it wouldn’t be any surprise if they flip places tomorrow when the final numbers come in. “Inkheart” another new release, finished in seventh, which is a disappointment for Warners…sort of. Look at this quote from Warners’ exec VP Jeff Goldstein in Variety:

“We’re disappointed. We wish the opening would have been bigger, but I think it was always going to be this type of result. Unfortunately, the audience wasn’t excited to see it.”

Yeah it doesn’t sound like they had a lot of faith in it. The almost total lack of ads for it was a tip-off anyway.

Well, what do we have to look forward to next week? Ah, “The Uninvited,” the remake of the Korean film “A Tale of Two Sisters” which will likely be a lot less creepy in its American incarnation. And in “Taken”, Liam Neeson supposedly reveals a level of badass-ness that many of us (including me) had not known was in him. Good show, Mr. Neeson!