Rocky may be back, but he's no longer the champ. Instead, it was the old-fashioned, fun family comedy Night at the Museum which took in the most bucks over the Christmas holiday weekend. The Ben Stiller comedy managed $30 million over the 3-Day weekend and $42 million over the full 4 days of Christmas break. Quite an accomplishment, with so much stiff, holiday competition.
Rocky Balboa wasn't completely beaten though. It still managed $17 million and third place on the chart behind last week's number one, Will Smith's Pursuit of Happyness. Other new openers fared not nearly so well. The Good Shepherd has an all-star director and cast, but only took in $14 million over three days. We Are Marshall is officially the big, stinking, exploding bomb it deserves to be. It only made $8 million over the three day, and most of that was probably ticket purchasing from obsessive, deluded Marshall University alumni. Face it folks, the movie's not good.
Way down at the bottom of the chart, movies like Letters from Iwo Jima, Venus and Curse of the Golden Flower opened in limited releases. In only 5 theaters Letters had one of the weekend's highest per-screen average. But it was Dreamgirls that proved itself the biggest small-release success. Friday - Sunday the film managed a $75 thousand per-screen average in only 3 theaters. On Monday, the movie went wider into 800 theaters and rocketed up the 4-day box office chart to 7th place, beating out movies in much wider releases. We Are Marshall for instance, got spanked by Eddie Murphy.
Below is are your full 3-day and 4-day box office totals. Next week Hollywood starts the post-holiday slowdown, with Black Christmas the only new wide release opening. Expect to see a lot of this week's winners repeat.
