The Cinema Numbers Review For 7/26/10: Inception Still The Exception At #1
1. Chris Nolan's Inception for Warner Bros/Legendary Pictures was still the No. 1 movie for its 2nd weekend in release, inciting exactly the intense interest from watercooler talk everyone thought it would. It went into Friday having made $100+M in the U.S. and Canada in just 7 days -- only the 5th film and the only original 2D movie to accomplish that this year. Inception made a big $13.2M Friday and $16.6M Saturday from 3,792 locations for a Superglue-like hold of -31% compared to its opening Friday-Saturday-Sunday for a $43.5M weekend and new cume of $143.6M. Ah, what dreamy legs for Nolan and the great cast on this $160M-budget scifi caper. Internationally, Inception had made a World Cup-slowed $16.5M going into Friday. But this weekend, it added 29 markets including Australia, France, Japan and Mexico and rolls out in about 50 territories by August 1st. I'll have an update Sunday AM. Based on the calendar year, Warner Bros has crossed the $1 billion mark this weekend at the domestic box for an industry record of 10 years in a row.
And thankfully it stayed number one over a wall over the top effort from a frail action star:
Sony Pictures set a new salary high for Angelina Jolie to star in this weekend's No. 2 movie Salt opening in 3,612 theaters. Still, the studio was gobsmacked when she set about earning every penny, whether it was long autograph-signing sessions at the pic's premieres or making a much-hyped panel appearance at Comic-Con. That was just a few of the marketing moves Sony made to sell Salt but there were more by Jeff Blake and Marc Weinstock and their team: concocting a high-octane ad campaign, devising a 9-week episodic online game, junketeering in Washington DC with a reception/tour of the International Spy Museum, even exploiting that recent real-life Russian sleeper spy ring in the news because of its similarities to the movie plot. "The Anna Chapman story resulted in extensive off entertainment page coverage mentioning Salt," one Sony exec explained to me.
Despicable Me continues to do well at #3, and other than that, well, yeah.....relevance proceeds.
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