Box Office Review: A Precious Weekend!

While Disney's A Christmas Carol won the weekend with an underwhelming $31M, the real story at the box-office was Precious. The darling of this year's Sundance Film Festival earned an astonishing $100,000 per theater, breaking the record for the largest opening EVER for a specialty film (A Christmas Carol, by contrast, earned a little over $8400 per venue). Michael Jackson's This Is It had a solid second weekend ($14M | $57.8M), just topping the fantastic The Men Who Stare at Goats ($13.3M) and the weird and phony The Fourth Kind ($12.5M). Not surprisingly, Paranormal Activity continued to print money ($8.6M | $97.4M).

The second half of the top 10 was led by the disappointing The Box ($7.8M). After that it was all hold-overs: the mediocre Couples Retreat ($6.4M | $95.9M), the rote Law Abiding Citizen ($6.1M | $60.8M), the superb Where the Wild Things Are ($4.2M | $69.2M) and the boring Astro Boy ($2.5M | $15M). In non-Precious limited release news, La Danse: Le Ballet de L'Opera de Paris ($14,000 per theater) and Splinterheads ($12,000 per) both enjoyed solid debuts. That Evening Sun didn't perform as well as hoped ($8900), possibly dooming the nascent Oscar bid of the wonderful Hal Holbrook. Let's hope not.