Giant Panda, Potent Zohan
Diversity pays.
A box office flush with movies about a martial-arts-fighting Ailuropoda melanoleuca and a hairdressing ex-Mossad agent was flush with cash, as the animated Kung Fu Panda and Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess With the Zohan combined to take in $100 million in their opening weekends.
Kung Fu Panda finished on top, with $60 million, per studio estimates today from Exhibitor Relations Co. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan took second, with $40 million.
Elsewhere, last weekend’s phenom Sex and the City broke a heel, with ticket sales falling 63 percent, but still managed to bring in another $21.3 million.
If the estimates hold, Kung Fu Panda should nudge Cars for eighth place on the list of all-time animation openers, per the stats at Box Office Mojo.
If the movie counts as a Jack Black movieBlack provided the panda vocalsthen it goes down as the comic’s No. 1 opener of all-time, and as a marked improvement over last winter’s Be Kind, Rewind.
Zohan definitely counts as a Sandler movie. As such, it’s debut stands as the star’s fifth biggest, just below Click and just ahead of 50 First Dates.
Since 1998’s The Waterboy, every classic Sandler comedy, meaning not Spanglish, has debuted in the mid-$30 millions to mid-$40 millions. Finding its sweet spot, Zohan represented an upgrade over I Know Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which opened on the low end of the Sandler scale last summer.
Drilling down in the box-office standings:
- Diversity extended to the grosses, as the $60 million-grossing Kung Fu Panda and the $775,000-”grossing” Made of Honor could both rightly call themselves Top 10 films.
- Speed Racer didn’t fall out of the Top 10. It plummeted, earning just $370,000 in its fifth weekend, per Box Office Mojo. Overall, the reportedly $120 million summer bomb has grossed $42 million.
- Not to make Mr. Racer feel
badworse, but Tina Fey’s Baby Mama (ninth place, $779,090), which reportedly cost $30 million to make, has grossed $57.9 million overall. - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (third place, $22.8 million; $253 million overall) is now within about $35 million of passing the finally tiring Iron Man (sixth place, $7.5 million; $288.9 million overall) as the year’s top-grossing movie.
- Second weekend fall off or no, Sex and the City is about a day, if not hours away, from cracking $100 million overall.
- Forgetting Sarah Marshall ($475,150) ends its Top 10 run after seven weekends, and a solid $61.5 million take.
- The new Heather Graham comedy Miss Conception averaged $500 on each of its three screens, per Box Office Mojo, and presumably began its journey to a Blockbuster shelf near you.
- John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott added up to $28,859 at six theaters for the new comedy The Promotion.
- The Genghis Khan epic Mongol put up the best, theater-for-theater numbers of the weekend, grossing $133,136 from five screens.
Here’s a recap of the top-grossing weekend films based on Friday-Sunday estimates compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
- Kung Fu Panda, $60 million
- You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, $40 million
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, $22.8 million
- Sex and the City, $21.3 million
- The Strangers, $9.3 million
- Iron Man, $7.5 million
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, $5.5 million
- What Happens in Vegas, $3.4 million
- Baby Mama, $779,090
- Made of Honor, $775,000