Monday Morning Box Office: Picking Your Kutcher-Flavored Poison
On this solemn day of atonement, meditate on the box office results, the numerical manifestation of God's love on Earth:
1. Open Season—$23 million
2. The Guardian—$17.667 million
It was a mere three weeks ago that it seemed that Hollywood had finally given up, allowing itself to slip into a depressive funk so profound that it couldn't even muster a token attempt at taking moviegoers' money. This weekend, however, the bedridden giant awakened more angry than sullen, obviously determined to destroy the public that it once so enthusiastically enslaved. It sent forth its emissary of the multiplex Apocalypse, Ashton Kutcher, knowing that virtually everyone who showed up at their local mall theater could be lured either into an Open Season or The Guardian screening to have their soul devoured by one of Kutcher's computer-animated talking animal or cocky, Coast Guard rescue swimmer forms. With a combined $40 million in box office, Hollywood will still need a couple of more weekends to finish the job, and is already planning on flooding theaters with nothing but rereleased prints of Guess Who? and compilations of Kutcher's best That 70s Show and Punk'd moments to eliminate the stragglers.
3. Jackass Number Two—$14.010 million
Watching as the sequel's relatively tiny $11.5 million production budget has brought in over $50 million at theaters in just two weeks, Paramount is fully embracing the Jackass Paradigm, slashing the budgets on all films, and replacing expensive sets and special effects with a variety of blunt instruments with which its stars, under pain of contractual termination for noncompliance, will be required to strike each other in the genitals. They're also looking into the possibility of acquiring Idiocracy's theoretical blockbuster of the future, Ass, with an eye towards releasing it over the 2007 Fourth of July weekend.
4. School for Scoundrels—$9.109 million
We're starting to think that Jon Heder might not evolve into the comedy superstar that the studios thought he might become based on his Napoleon Dynamite hairstyle.
11. All the King's Men—$1.6 million
Two weekends, just over $6 million. That extra year of editing definitely seems to be paying off.