'Hancock' Parks It At First
Has clicking your mouse become something of a chore ever since you lost your thumb and forefinger in a spectacular illegal-fireworks demonstration on your front lawn? Fret not: Thanks to TetraMouse—the "lowest priced mouth-operated mouse on the market," access to your weekend box office numbers is just a glottal stop away:
1. Hancock - $66 million
When not delighting crowds at New Village Academy Oh-Tee Eights games as that wrestling team's mascot Elron the Iguana, Will Smith also manages to shatter records in only the way The Biggest Star in the World can. His presence in Hancock, for example, turned an ill-conceived, anti-superhero movie about an alcoholic underachiever who accidentally puts out fires with his super-upchuck abilities into something America simply had to experience for themselves: $107.3 million over 5.5 days, $66 million from the weekend alone. That works out to roughly 10 million people who surveyed the sour, puckering butt-face (above) used as the film's central marketing image, and paid to see this movie anyway. That's superstardom.
2. Wall-E - $33.417 million
Pixar's melancholy meditation on the dark (seriously dark!) places towards which our things-obsessed society is heading crossed the $100 million mark over the weekend. The film's message is so bold, however, that its makers—who have long relied on merchandising and fast food tie-ins to push the product—suddenly find themselves painted into an ideological corner. Still, Disney has come up with a P.R.-friendly solution: Disney's Sprout In A Boot ™ foundation pledges that for every square-mile of Wall-E packaging dumped into the nation's landfills, a single bean sproutling potted in an adorable hobo's boot will be donated to a worthy school, for display and educational purposes.
3. Wanted - $20.607 million
4. Get Smart - $11.125 million
5. Kung Fu Panda - $7.5 million
Summer '08s Trio of Assassin Entertainments continue their stealthy creep towards profitability and inevitable sequeldom. But only one of these three contains an army of suicide-bombing rodents, waging jihad bis saif against those who have wronged them. We'll never tell which—you'll just have to see all three to find out!
8. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl - $3.6 million
The wide-release of the Depression-era movie based on the wildly popular American Girl doll franchise managed only a disappointing eighth place. Audience feedback suggested most of the intended demo lost interest once they realized the narrative was essentially locked-in, and that they couldn't drag star Abigail Breslin into a hair salon for a braid-treatment and some tea and cucumber sandwiches whenever they felt like it.