From left: Chris Evans as Johnny Storm, Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards, Jessica Alba as Sue Storm, and Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm, make up the Fantastic Four. - Contributed
LOS ANGELES (AP):
Hollywood's superhero foursome remained fantastic at the box office.
The 20th Century Fox sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer debuted as the number one weekend film with US$57.4 million, slightly surpassing the US$56.1 million opening of Fantastic Four two years ago, according to studio estimates yesterday.
Among other new wide releases, a favourite teen detective had trouble finding an audience as the Warner Bros. mystery Nancy Drew premiered with a so-so US$7.1 million to finish at number seven.
Opening in narrower release was the Weinstein Co. thriller DOA: Dead or Alive, an adaptation of the martial-arts video game that pulled in just US$232,000.
Playing in 505 theatres, DOA averaged a paltry US$460 a cinema, compared to US$14,499 in 3,959 theatres for Fantastic Four and US$2,732 in 2,612 locations for Nancy Drew.
Blockbuster may
The previous weekend's number one movie, George Clooney and Brad Pitt's Ocean's Thirteen, fell to number two with US$19.1 million. The Warner Bros. casino caper raised its 10-day total to US$69.8 million, putting it on track to become the franchise's third US$100 million hit.
Despite the big opening for Fantastic Four, Hollywood revenues slipped for the third straight weekend. The top 12 movies took in US$138.8 million, down four per cent from the same weekend last year, when Cars, Nacho Libre and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift led the box office with a combined US$86 million.
The industry had a blockbuster May with Spider-Man, Shrek and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, but big films are not holding on to their audiences after huge opening weekends.
After a surge early this year, movie attendance has slipped to just a fraction ahead of 2006's, diminishing prospects of a record summer that many box-office analysts have predicted.
"We've seen our advantage over last year slowly being chipped away," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. "A lot of films are doing what these big summer movies do, open big and drop off fast."
The new Fantastic Four reunites the quartet of astronauts-turned-mutant superheroes, played by Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans. This time, the comic-book heroes join forces with archenemy Dr. Doom (Julian McMahon) to take down the Silver Surfer, an emissary leading a planet-destroying entity to Earth.
More family-friendly
The studio and filmmakers toned down the action so the sequel could earn a PG rating to broaden the audience to family viewers. The first Fantastic Four was rated PG-13.
"A lot of the superhero comic-book movies are sort of geared toward being darker and edgier. We think Fantastic Four is a more family-friendly group of superheroes," said Chris Aronson, senior vice-president for distribution at 20th Century Fox. "We wanted to make sure to cast a wide net and go after the family audience, and it worked."
Inspired by the Carolyn Keene mystery novels, the PG-rated Nancy Drew had less success with the female family audience. Nancy Drew stars Emma Roberts, niece of Julia Roberts, as the teen sleuth, who investigates the death of a movie star while visiting Hollywood.
Warner Bros. was hoping for solid weekday business from teenage girls to give a lift to the movie, said Dan Fellman, the studio's head of distribution. The movie was made on a modest budget of just over US$20 million.
"We don't need a lot of money to come out ahead on Nancy Drew," Fellman said.
