US box office report: Tropic Thunder hangs on

Ron Hogan

Tropic Thunder reigns, while Rainn Wilson's The Rocker bombs. Plus The Dark Knight closes in on $500m...

Published on Aug 26, 2008

The story this weekend is not the fact that Tropic Thunder holds onto the top spot at the US box office with $16.2 million dollars. No, the story this weekend is of the colossal failure of the Rainn Wilson vehicle The Rocker. It was not in the top five. It wasn’t even in the top ten! No, The Rocker suffered one of the worst opening weekends of all time, coming in at number 13 with an opening of only $2.6 million dollars. That’s after debuting in over 2784 theaters! To put things in perspective, 2003’s Gigli made $3.7 million dollars in 2215 theaters. Vicky Cristina Barcelona made more money on 2100 less screens! That is how badly The Rocker has done.

Fellow comedy House Bunny has done much better, easing comfortably into second place this weekend with $14.5 million dollars. Like Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! (eighth place, $4.3 million), the silly Anna Faris comedy from the creators of Legally Blonde exceeded expectations. I like Anna Faris a great deal, and I’m glad to see she’s doing well outside of the spoof movie genre. It takes a lot of brains to play that dumb.

That said, this is the summer, and summer means explosions and violence. Death Race has both of those, in spades, and it brought in a very healthy $12.6 million dollars for third place at the box office. The Dark Knight, the biggest movie of the summer and of the year by far, fell to fourth place this weekend, with $10.5 million dollars grossed. While it failed to cross $500 million this weekend, it’ll get there this week unless something crazy happens.

The next three positions at the box office, fifth, sixth, and seventh, were all within $1 million of one another, making the race for the last spot in the top five a tight one. Thanks to me, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, managed to come in fifth place this weekend with a gross of $5.6 million bucks. Pineapple Express finds itself in sixth place, with $5.45 million dollars in business. The latest buddy comedy from Seth Rogen has been a strong hit for Judd Apatow and company, with a US gross of nearly $74 million dollars. Mirrors (seventh place, $5 million) is far from a hit, having brought in only $20 million dollars or so in the States.

Summer isn’t the best time for horror movies, obviously.

Strangely enough, the bottom three movies in the top ten continue this bunching trend, except a million dollars lower than the fifth through seventh place movies. Mamma Mia! took eighth place (as mentioned previously), with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor bringing in ninth place with $4.1 million dollars. Ice Cube’s latest family comedy, The Longshots, rounds out the top ten in its opening week, with a gross of $4.08 million dollars. While early summer is generally a strong time for family movies, school is back in session and that means the kids aren’t flocking to the multiplexes to fill hot summer days. The fact that The Longshots is basically every other kid sports movie ever made doesn’t help it rise above the fray.

Speaking of frays, next week is a pretty packed one at the beginning of the late-summer dumping ground season. Comedies fighting for supremacy are Disaster Movie, the latest from the creators of Date Movie and Meet the Spartans, and College, which is Animal House for people without taste mixed with Superbad for people with no soul. Also debuting are Vin Diesel’s latest science fiction film, Babylon A.D. (now with extra stolen Akira references!) and this week’s Wednesday opener is Don Cheadle’s conspiracy thriller Traitor.

In limited release this week is a surprisingly British Emma Watson vehicle, Ballet Shoes. A BBC TV film gets picked up and pushed into American theaters! The only reason for this is the presence of Emma Watson, and the off chance that the picture will pick up a little bit of Harry Potter money...