Box Office Review: Who knew?

Horton hears some serious dough | Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

With a huge release hitting theaters virtually every Friday, it's rare that a movie tops the box office over successive weekends and yet that's exactly what Horton Hears a Who managed over the Easter holiday. It took in a healthy $25.1M ($86.4M), easily outdistancing Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns which brought in a reliably solid $20M in its debut. Fellow newcomer Shutter managed about half as much as that ($10.7M) while Drillbit Taylor disappointed badly in its opening weekend ($10.2M). That's two misses in a row for the Apatow brand (Walk Hard being the other). Has Judd's stardust finally turned into potato flakes?

After that it was mostly holdovers: the awful 10,000 B.C. ($8.6M/$76.1M), the derivative Never Back Down ($4.8M/$16.8M), the infantile College Road Trip ($4.6M/$32M), the superb The Bank Job ($4.1M/$19.4M) and the mediocre Vantage Point ($3.8M/$65.3M). Aside from Meet the Browns, the weekend's biggest surprise may have been Under the Same Moon which averaged almost $10,000 a theater on its way to a $3.3M haul. It set a record for the opening of a Spanish-language film and marked a rare triumph for the Weinstein Company. In limited release, Love Songs averaged $10,950 while The Hammer did a so-so $5352.