Scott Rosenberg
jon
Weekend box-office: 21 wins
The headlines are screaming “Clooney Fumbles at Box-office” but hey, give the dude a chance.
Universal Pictures ‘Leatherheads’, in which Clooney helmed and stars, did come in 2nd place at this weekend’s box-office raking in $13.5 million from 2,769 locations.
photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon -- Universal Studios
It beat out other openers - Fox’s Nim’s Island in 3rd, taking in 13.3 million from 3,513 locations and Paramount-DreamWorks ‘The Ruins in 5th place with $7.8 million from 2,812 play-dates.
In first place, in its second week of release was Sony-Columbia’s Las Vegas caper ‘21’ while Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! released by Fox, now in its fourth release week took in $9.1million from 3,571 locations for a total cume to date of $131.1 million.
Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert film, ‘Shine a Light’ in limited release, grossed $1.5 mil from 276 venues (including several IMAX locations) while Wong Kar-Wai's English-language romance, ‘My Blueberry Nights’, costarring Norah Jones, averaged $12,290 from six theaters. French import ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’, with Juliette Binoche, earned $18,000 from two theaters.
Weekend’s take was down more than 23 percent from the same period a year ago — the seventh ''down'' weekend out of the last eight.
Worse still, after a solid start, 2008 is now officially struggling: Revenue is off 1.75 percent from the first 14 weeks of 2007 and attendance has declined nearly 5 percent.
Needless to say, all eyes will be on the Prom Night remake next weekend to see if it can help turn the downward box-office spiral.
