Monday Morning Box Office: Spike's Biggest Day
Like waking up from a gutshot-induced coma to find your loving family assembled at your bedside and your taste of the Colombian bloodbath nearby in a fat manila envelope, the weekend box office numbers:
1. Inside Man—$29 million
Encouraged by the success of a heist genre project that was a more commercial undertaking than his previous films, this morning Spike Lee and his agents are sitting down to formulate a further expansion of what constitutes a "Spike Lee Joint." A tough decision will need to be made as to whether Lee will next helm something featuring talking animals, or should he really want to test the outer limits of his Hollywood ambition, any movie in which Matthew McConaughey takes off his shirt while falling in love.
2. V for Vendetta—$12.3 million
Natalie Portman doesn't do it for the money, so when she plays a stripper, it's because of a genuine curiousity about what it's like to twirl around a pole without taking one's clothes off, not the paycheck.
3. Stay Alive—$11.2 million
Frankie Muniz, on the other hand, has obivously entered the "accept any paycheck with enough zeroes" portion of his career. When he takes his first stripper role, you can be sure he's going to do the full frontal without too much protest.
4. Failure to Launch—$10.8 million
We've already mentioned McConaughey once in this round-up; for our own sanity and yours, we'll refrain from dragging him into this another time.
5. The Shaggy Dog—$9.1 million
But more importantly: Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector came in seventh with just $7.05 million. We are heartened that the Cable Guy seems to need a second job to make ends meet, but saddened by the prospect that the movie will probably go on to make a fortune on DVD, underwriting further blue-collar vocational explorations.
