Tuesday Morning Box Office: Ben Stiller Now Synonymous With Christmas
Toast surviving yet another Christmas relatively unscathed—save for that one unfortunate incident in which Grandma's ill-timed offering of a homemade sugar cookie during a particularly strenuous match of Wii bowling resulted in a controller
lodging itself into the base of her skull—with the holiday weekend's box office numbers:
1. Night at the Museum—$30 million
That Night at the Museum performed this well shouldn't come as that big of a surprise: God knows parents weren't going to bring their kids to an actual museum this weekend, where they would be forced to interact with their children for any number of hours, while being required to address questions whose answers may not necessarily have been covered by the exhibits' description plaques. Thanks to Ben Stiller's screen adventures, however, parents could feel secure in knowing their kids' weekend entertainment included valuable educational elements as well—that Teddy Roosevelt had a facility with multiple accents, for example, including "old Jewish man."
2. The Pursuit of Happyness—$15 million
The first Will Smith vehicle in a long while not to feature one of Smith's own finger-snapping, accessible hip hop anthems, director Gabriele Muccino felt that Smith's offering of "Diggity Diggity Diggity Happyness (We're Pursuin' It!)" was just a little too upbeat for the film's subject matter, and ultimately opted not to include it on the film's soundtrack.
3. Rocky Balboa—$12.5 million
Sylvester Stallone can hold his head up high, knowing his campaigning on behalf of his scrappy little geriatric fighter movie successfully brainwashed at least a part of the moviegoing public into believing that not seeing it amounted to the elder abuse we've all read about on cop car bumper stickers.
4. The Good Shepherd—$10 million
History buff audiences turned away in droves after writing the film off as science fiction, due in no small part to Matt Damon's admission that his character is married to Angelina Jolie, yet the two don't engage in regular, unhinged monkey-sex.
5. Charlotte's Web—$8 million
Surprisingly, there has been little protest about the movie's one major twist on the source material, in which Wilbur the Pig is saved, but the entire family sits down to a meal of roasted Gussy the Goose instead, tearing into the steaming poultry flesh and heartily agreeing, "Mmmmm...That's good Oprah!"
