Hot Lesbian Ballerina Sex Surprisingly Lucrative at the Box Office
Who knew! We're certainly shocked. But not more shocked than when we heard that Tangled managed to beat Harry Potter in the slow-ish post-Thanksgiving weekend. That's a big deal! As big a deal as Burlesque? Uh, no. Definitely bigger.
1) Tangled — $21.5M
Wowee! Holding on like a champ, this animated sex romp managed to defeat Harry Potter, coasting likely due to good word of mouth, the extra cost of 3D tickets, and the promise of an "even steamier" director's cut with "more scintillating hair-play." This puts Mandy Moore up there with Kathleen Turner as one of the most successful erotic cartoon voice actresses of the past thirty years or so. Quite a place to be, I tell ya. Though, really, we knew she had it in her. The true surprise is the emergence of Zachary Levi as a virile, growling, grunting sex 'toon voicer. No one saw that coming! (We just heard it.) For so long he was just The Chuck on The Chuck, but now he is a caramel-voiced sex dynamo, sure to spice up the aural screen in movies like Tangled 2: Tingled and How to Train Someone Else's Dragon. Mandy Moore, meanwhile, has already begun work on Down, the disarmingly sexy sequel to Up.
2) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 — $16.7M
Don't feel too badly for this movie for not nabbing the number one spot for a third week. It's still made a robust $244M and stands to make a decent heap more before it leaves theaters forever. Plus, overseas it's made another couple hundred million. So no one's crying into their butter beer down at the Leaky Cauldron because they lost to Tangled in America. Tangled is just titillating filth with no lasting appeal. Harry Potter is Harry Potter! Eternal! Strong! Brave! And, of course, it can always say "At least this movie doesn't star The Chuck." There's always that, at least.
3) Burlesque — $6.1M
This little movie held on OK for a second week. Sure it's only a little more than halfway to making its budget back and will probably slow considerably after this week, but hey, it's not yet a complete disaster, so that's saying something. Cher and Xtina don't quite yet have to get into their spaceship made of rubber-boob material, powered by champagne and Vaseline, and blast off back to their home planet. Someday they will, of course. They will have to board the S.S. Camperella and go zooming into some molten cheese and liquid gold galaxy where they will live forever with a young David Hasselhoff and Usher. Someday that will happen and we will run out of our homes and see the fizzy, sparking streak of pink light as it courses up into the night sky and we will wave our hands and wipe away tears and know that we will miss them terribly but that they are going to where they need to be. But for now, they're still here with us. So we should be grateful for that.
13) Black Swan — $1.4M
Holy cuticles! This movie did bonkers box office this weekend, opening on only 18 screens and earning a crackerjack $77k at each of them. I guess more people like ballet than we thought! I guess more people like bloody broken toenails than we could have dreamed! I guess more people like artsy Grand Guignol than anyone could have expected. I'm sure it has nothing to do with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis making out and hooking up. That likely has nothing to do with it. Why would that have anything to do with it? I mean, who wants to see that, with all the moaning and grinding and hair tossing and more moaning and significantly more grinding? Nobody likes that, no one in the world, except maybe weird sex perverts who live in shacks and/or cabins, and those people don't go to movie theaters. (Do you?) No, I think this movie was buoyed by a lot of modern day Tchaikovsky devotees and maybe some of those rabid Vincent Cassel fans you're always hearing about in America. That's got to be it. It had nothing to do with the licking and biting and ecstatic shrieking. No way.*
23) I Love You, Phillip Morris — $113K
Well, it finally came out. Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor's gay romp in which they are gay and do gay things together opened on six screens in this nation on Friday, earning a respectable but not remarkable $19k at each venue. So, there you have it. That is how much people want to see Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, two old dogs who survived the go-go '90s, become gay together, which involves the doing of gay things, gayly. It's both more and less than I thought it would be, a sign of our politically and socially halved times. Did I mention they are gay in this?
*Obviously whenever I write about this movie, I should disclose that they have advertised on Gawker before, so clearly I was paid by Fox Searchlight and other shadowy investors to say good things, or any things really, about their movie on this website. I have a long track record of doing such things, so commenters and emailers are right to suggest that that's how I conduct myself as a writer. There is nothing a little disappointing or insulting about you, dear readers, implying that I A) am for sale and B) think you're dumb enough for me to pass off advertorial on you like regular editorial. Nope, that doesn't suck to hear at all. So, good. We're on the same page now. I'm a shill and you're all Encyclopedia Browns for cracking the case. Thanks.