Monday Morning Box Office: Bow Down Before Your Jackass Masters
Remove your shoes and soak your feet in a tub full of the warm, soothing waters of the weekend box office numbers:
1. Jackass Number Two—$28.106 million
From the moment that the first drops of Steve-O's magic urine stream soggily consecrated the red carpet [link NSFW] at the Jackass Number Two premiere Thursday night, the movie seemed blessed, with a big opening weekend all but an inevitability. We expect that superstitious executives at Paramount will now form a causal link between a healthy premiere and the ritualistic elimination of bodily waste, and are already reaching out to Clint Eastwood's people to see if the revered director wouldn't mind ceremonially defecating as he enters the Flags of Our Fathers premiere next month, hoping a healthy bowel movement might boost both the film's box office take and its Oscar prospects.
2. Jet Li's Fearless—$10.564 million
Some recent stories erroneously reported that martial arts superstar Jet Li planned on retiring after Fearless, but as it turns out, he's merely giving up kung fu films, not his entire acting life. Li hopes that his his post-kung-fu acting career will parallel that of idol Bruce Lee, who effortlessly transitioned from martial arts to two decades of frothy romantic comedies once he tired of the physical rigors of the genre he helped define.
3. Gridiron Gang—$9.7 million
Perhaps having gotten all the tough love it needed last weekend, moviegoers didn't seem to be nearly as interested in a value-affirming bear-hug from America's second-cuddliest wrestler-turned-actor (clearly, Hulk "Mr. Nanny" Hogan holds that title), especially when they could opt for two hours of the Jackass boys stapling their scrotums to a variety of stationary objects, the ultimate cinematic expression of self-worth.
4. Flyboys—$6.012 million
Billionaire heir David Ellison might have invested himself into a role in Flyboys, but maybe the film's producers should have earmarked a couple of the millions he contributed to the production budget for buying enough tickets to guarantee a decent opening.
7. All the King's Men—$3.8 million
When it was first announced, we thought that Sony's unconventional strategy of delaying All the King's Men from 2005 to 2006 so that it could quickly disappear in an even-numbered year would never work, but we stand corrected. They obviously knew what they were doing all along