Monday Morning Box Office: Mistakes Were Made: Quality Movie Succeeds At The Multiplex
Celebrate this Columbus Day like you would any other Monday: by drowning out the sorrows of another seemingly endless week of indentured servitude with the box office numbers:
1. The Departed—$27.015 million
That a well-acted, funny, and overall pretty brilliant crime thriller starring a handful of Bonafide A-List Actors and directed by perhaps the greatest director of his generation would find this much success in its opening weekend was clearly an error. Surely, Warner Bros. meant not to break the studio pact that's enabled two straight months of box office blight, and mistakenly delivered prints of The Departed to thousands of theaters instead of the movie they'd agreed to put into wide release, the story of five computer-animated, wisecracking woodland creatures who learn an important lesson about chasing their dreams by forming a football team, performing light witchcraft, and kicking each other in the genitals. The Warners folks will probably have a lot of explaining to do this morning to their offended peers.
2. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning—$19.150 million
Thank your Maker for His gift of Michael Bay. Without him, some of the most beloved horror flicks of the last couple of decades might have been left to languish unrented on video store shelves or buried deep in Netflix queues, never to find their way to a new generation of teenage eyeballs. By exhuming these tragically outdated genre masterpieces from the moribund DVD format, reshooting them with actresses most famous for briefly dating Marky Mark, and giving them a second life at the multiplex, he's truly doing the Lord's work.
3. Open Season—$16 million
For a second straight week, audiences have clearly stated their preference for experiencing Ashton Kutcher's acting talents filtered through his animated, mule deer form, rather than his more conventional, human shell.
4. Employee of the Month—$11.8 million
We're grateful that someone finally had the vision to strip Jessica Simpson of the bikini-top and Daisy-Duke-cutoff crutches that have unfairly distracted from her mastery of craft. Relieved of these bimbo accouterments, a true acting career has finally been born.
5. The Guardian—$9.643 million
Despite The Guardian's slow start, Disney is still thinking that a sequel might be viable with some strategic recasting. They plan on returning to the two salad bowls containing slips of paper with the names of Formerly Huge Stars That Will Work For Cheap and Pretty Boys Who Might Excite The MTV Crowd that brought Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher to this project, hoping that their next randomly selected pairing of actors might fare better than this duo.