Despite a critical drubbing and worries about franchise fatigue, Underworld Awakening has fought through to top the US box office in its first weekend, taking a respectable $25.4 million. That’s a little ahead on Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans, although that movie didn’t have Kate Beckinsale or a boost from premium price 3D ticket sales.
Red Tails also got off to a stronger start than many had expected, with the George Lucas produced movie taking $19.1 million. Although not amazing, many saw it as a very risky venture, with Lucas funding the entire project himself because no studio would touch a WWII movie with an all-black cast. Although the film’s still got a long way to go to make Lucas back his $70 million plus, it’s on the right track.
Doing less well was the expansion of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which went from a few screens to over 2,000, but only took $10.5 million. While that wouldn’t be too bad for most dramas, it makes it the least attended movie for either Tom Hanks or Sandra Bullock in 15 years. However with bad reviews and a marketing campaign that never seemed certain what the movie was, it’s perhaps not surprising the movie has faltered.
The only other new entry was Haywire, which took fifth spot with $9 million. That’s about in line with several other female oriented action movies, such as Hanna, but it’s not a great start. It doesn’t help that despite seeming to go down okay with the critics, audiences coming out of screenings don’t seem to like it much, and so word of mouth is likely to be lousy.
Take a look below for the US box office top 10 for the weekend on January 20th-22nd.
| Rank | Title | Weekend Gross (millions) | Total Gross to date (millions) |
| 1 | Underworld Awakening | $25.4 | $25.4 |
| 2 | Red Tails | $19.1 | $19.1 |
| 3 | Contraband | $12.2 | $46.1 |
| 4 | Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close | $10.5 | $11.2 |
| 5 | Haywire | $9.0 | $9.0 |
| 6 | Beauty and the Beast | $8.5 | $33.3 |
| 7 | Joyful Noise | $6.0 | $21.9 |
| 8 | Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol | $5.5 | $197.3 |
| 9 | Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows | $4.8 | $178.6 |
| 10 | The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo | $3.7 | $94.7 |
Although Martin Luther King Day is a four day weekend in the US, it isn’t one of the particularly big holidays for cinema-going. That said, the Mark Wahlberg starring Contraband did pretty well, scoring a $28.8 million debut to top the chart.
Paramount’s decision to set up a unit to make and purchase micro-budget genre movies for under a million dollars certainly seems to be paying off. They decided on the strategy following the success of Paranormal Activity, and with The Devil Inside it’s working far better than they expected.
If the studios were hoping for some four-day holiday New Year’s cheer at the box office, they didn’t get a huge amount, with Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol the only real bright spot. The overall box office was down over last New Year, but Ghost Protocol added another $38 million to take its total to $14 million in the US and $361 million worldwide. It’s a decent hit but not astounding.
The Christmas US box office is slightly unusual, as while it was a holiday four-day weekend, rather than releasing movie on a Friday, many of the studios decided to either release their movie early or wait until Christmas itself, largely because they now Christmas Eve always tends to be an unsually weak day (whereas Saturday is normally the best day of the week). The result is that while some of these new films movies got off to decent starts, they couldn’t beat out previously released flicks.
