Derek Luke (centre) dribbles towards the basket in a scene from the movie 'Glory Road'.
LOS ANGELES, (Reuters):
THE COLLEGE basketball saga Glory Road triumphed at the weekend box office in North America, narrowly beating fellow newcomers Last Holiday and Hoodwinked, according to studio estimates issued yesterday.
Glory Road sold about US$13.5 million worth of tickets in the Friday-to-Sunday period, followed by the Queen Latifah comedy remake Last Holiday with US$13.0 million, and the animated tale Hoodwinked with US$12.2 million.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe fell two places to number four with US$10.1 million. Last weekend's champion, the torture thriller Hostel, tumbled to number five with US$9.6 million. Their respective totals rose to US$261.4 million and US$34.8 million.
FINAL DATA
With the Martin Luther King holiday falling today, some studios were waiting to report four-day estimates. Final data will be issued tomorrow.
Glory Road, released by Walt Disney Co., recounts the true story of a Texas university basketball team that broke the colour barrier when it went to the NCAA championship with an all-black starting line-up.
Disney said the film made as much in three days as industry analysts had been expecting it to make in four days. That was also the case with Paramount Pictures' Last Holiday, in which Queen Latifah plays a woman who takes the trip of a lifetime after learning she has a terminal disease.
Still, the films will come nowhere near last year's Martin Luther King weekend leader, Coach Carter, which opened with US$29.2 million for the four days.
Hoodwinked, an animated update of the Little Red Riding Hood fable, was released by the Weinstein Co., the nascent banner formed by Miramax Films co-founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein.
Further down the charts, number seven-ranked King Kong finally passed the double-century mark, reaching US$202.8 million in its 33rd day of release after a US$7.3 million weekend. Narnia, by contrast, took 22 days to reach that milestone.
And Steven Spielberg's Munich, no longer in the top 10, rose to US$32.8 million after a US$4.9 million weekend. Short of a miraculous Oscar boost, the Munich Olympics revenge thriller will likely become one of those rare Spielberg efforts not to hit US$100 million.
