RODENTS MAGICALLY BRING DOWN WIZARD
Monday, July 27 2009
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Who would have thought? Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince lasted just one week at the top of the box office, toppled by the animated rodents of Disney's G-Force. Perhaps even more voldemortifying, it did only slightly better than a relatively low-budget, critically derided romantic comedy, The Ugly Truth. G-Force, which combines animation and live-action, took in an estimated $32.2 million -- about $12 million more than analysts had predicted. The latest Potter sequel, by contrast, earned about $10 million less than what had had been expected -- $30 million, representing a 61-percent drop from last weekend. Most surprising of all perhaps was the performance of the Katherine Heigl starrer The Ugly Truth, which debuted with $27 million, well above analysts' forecasts, to place third. Sony Pictures' distribution chief Rory Bruer appeared steeped in schadenfreude when he told the Associated Press this ugly truth about the film's solid opening: "If I have a choice of deciding between what the audience's opinion is going to be versus the critics', I'll definitely go with the audience's every day, and they spoke loud and clear." A third new film, the horror flick Orphan, came in fourth with $12.8 million, somewhat less than forecast. Still going strong was the summer's biggest hit, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which added another $8 million to its gross to become, with a total of $379 million, the 10th-highest-grossing movie of all time.
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