Monday Morning Box Office: March Of The Tap-Dancing Penguin
On Monday morning (especially on this post-Cruise wedding Monday), there is only pain. Dull the agony of your dreaded return to work with the weekend box office numbers:
1. Happy Feet—$42.320 million
Happy Feet has received such positive attention for integrating a message of environmental preservation into its family-friendly story of a tap-dancing penguin that the movie's producers are already honing in on the social issue to be spotlighted in the inevitable sequel. They're in talks to obtain the rights to controversial penguin tale And Tango Makes Three, hoping to build the fledgling franchise's next installment, Happy Feet II: Mumble Has Two Daddies, around the issue of gay adoption.
2. Casino Royale—$40.6 million
[Spoiler alert, proceed at your own peril! We mean it.] Maybe Sony and the Broccolis knew what they were doing when they recast debonair Pierce Brosnan with the beefier, rougher Daniel Craig. One can't help but feel that if Brosnan were stripped naked, lashed to a chair with no bottom, and threatened with having his genitals repeatedly smashed with a knotted rope, he not only would have given up whatever information his interrogators desired, but additionally offered naked photos of the Queen and the launch codes for Great Britain's entire nuclear arsenal.
3. Borat—$14.350 million
By the end of the day, we suspect that even Borat's fictional documentary producer, Azamet Bagatov, will have filed a lawsuit claiming that the producers tricked him into trying to suffocate Sacha Baron Cohen with his buttocks and testicles, causing irreparable harm to his reputation.
4. The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause—$8.218 million
5. Flushed Away—$6.812 million
We are no longer interested in discussing Tim Allen in a fat suit or computer-animated rodents exploring the enchanted place where humans dispose of their feces.
12. Let's Go to Prison—$2.108 million
Universal's takeaway from this disappointing opening: Next time, they'll get those pee-activated urinal cakes installed a couple of weeks earlier and in thousands more locations, making sure that no one who uses a public bathroom can claim that they haven't heard of their movie.