Mark Wahlberg has been flexing his muscles ever since his Marky Mark music videos two decades ago. The 40-year-old star, now also one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, still has the bulges where they matter: on his body and at the box office. His new action thriller Contraband earned $24.1 million from Friday to Sunday and $28.8 million over the four-day Martin Luther King weekend, according to preliminary studio estimates, to finish No. 1 at North American theaters. In doing so, Walhberg beat the 3-D reissue of the 1991 animated feature Beauty and the Beast. It was as if the Disney movie’s villain, the muscle-bound Gaston, had taken an Ultimate Fighting championship from the cross-species hero.
For the third weekend in a row, business was up from the same time last year, allowing Hollywood to believe that the winter, early spring and autumn of 2011 were an eight-month bad dream that moguls and moviegoers alike are now awakening from. Rather than rushing to see the highly-touted Oscar contenders starting to flood theaters, audiences stuck with old-reliable star quality. Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows kept proving that stars in familiar action-adventures can still attract big crowds. M:I 4 (and damn all the punctuation in that title) has passed the half-billion-dollar mark worldwide, while Holmes is nearing $400 million.
Wahlberg isn’t in Cruise’s or Downey’s megawattage class, and doesn’t try to be. Think of the actor as a younger Liam Neeson, cranking out low-budget melodramas that play to his Soloflex strengths. Contraband, a remake of the 2008 Icelandic caper Reykjavik-Rotterdam—and directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the original film’s star (but not its director)—was produced for a thrifty $25 million. It tallied an enthusiastic A-minus from audiences canvassed by the CinemaScore polling firm.
(MORE: See Mary Pols’ review of Contraband)
Earning $18.5 for its first three days, and a predicted $23.5 million for four, the Beauty and the Beast 3-D edition did about as expected: halfway between the sound-breaking roar of The Lion King call-back last Sept. ($30.2 million in its first three days) and the reissue of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 as a double feature ($12.5 million) the year before. The B&B take should be enough to keep Disney on track in its plan to release other animated classics from its library (Aladdin) and Pixar’s (Finding Nemo) in the usurious 3-D format.
(MORE: see Corliss’ review of Beauty and the Beast)
Less appealing was Joyful Noise, the Christian-themed, multiracial singoff between Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton. Playing well in the South (it was set and shot in Georgia) but anathema in the big cities, it earned $11.2 million in its first three days, $13.8 million in four. A gyno-rmous 73% of the Joy-Noi audience was female, while B&B‘s was 69%. That left the guys either to see Contraband or to stay home and watch the NFL’s most celebrated quarterbacks—MVP-designate Aaron Rodgers and Jesus’ favorite player Tim Tebow—get humiliated and eliminated.
(MORE: See Corliss’ review of Joyful Noise)
Didn’t anybody know that this was also Golden Globes weekend? Some must have heard about The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher bio-fantasy that earned Meryl Streep a Globe statuette last night. Expanding from five to 802 theaters, the film earned $5.4 million in three days, a projected $6.4 million in four. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the John Le Carré spy story that may net Gary Oldman an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, took in $3.2 million on 866 screens from Friday to Sunday. The Artist, the Best Comedy or Musical Golden Globe winner that is considered by many the film to beat for Best Picture, pulled in $1.2 million at 216 venues. It goes aggressively wider this Friday.
(MORE: Wrapping up this year’s Golden Globes)
These are respectable numbers for honorable films… but consider: On MLK weekend last year, movies with legitimate Oscar hopes—True Grit, The King’s Speech and Black Swan—filled the 3, 4 and 5 slots, and had earned a cumulative $250 million since their post-Thanksgiving Day openings. The Fighter was in ninth place that weekend, with a $67-million purse in its first six weeks. Three other serious Oscar contenders—Toy Story 3, Inception and The Social Network—were deep into their theatrical runs at this point, and two of these were smashes; the combined gross for this trio was more than $800 million. That’s $1.1 billion for seven of the 10 films that would be nominated for Best Picture. Even including the “indie” finalists—The Kids Are All Right, 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone, which amassed a modest $38.2 million among them—the 10 nominees averaged a box office gross, to this date last year, of more than $110 million per picture. And The King’s Speech was just gaining steam: as the movie chugged toward its Best Picture win and beyond, it earned another $90 million.
This Oscar season, plenty is different. Implementing new rules more complicated than a rapper’s handshake, the Academy will nominate between five and 10 films, most probably seven or eight. The finalists are expected to come from this list: The Artist, The Descendants, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball and War Horse. Only one picture in this octet has passed the $100-million mark (The Help), with another (Dragon Tattoo) certain to cross soon into the nine-figure zone. Of the others, only Moneyball has earned as much as $75 million.
(MORE: See Corliss’ review of the 2011 Box Office)
The Artist, The Descendants and possibly War Horse may get sharp spurs at the box office from major Oscar attention. The Best Picture winner, however, is likely to be a film loved by the members of the Motion Picture Academy but not by the mass movie audience. Some of the nominees may not even earn as much as Mark Wahlberg’s latest workout video.
Here are the Sunday estimates of this holiday weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, with totals for Friday-to-Sunday (three days) and Friday-to-Monday (four days), as reported by Hollywood.com:
- Contraband, $24.1 million, first three days; $28.8 million, first four days
- Beauty and the Beast, $18.5 million, first three days; $23.5 million, first four days of rerelease
- Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, $11.5 million, three days; $14.2 million, four days; $189.4 million, fifth week
- Joyful Noise, $11.2 million, first three days; $13.8 million, first four days
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, $8.4 million, three days; $10.5 million, four days; $172.1 million, fifth week
- The Devil Inside, $7.9 million, three days; $9.2 million, four days; $47.5 million, second week
- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, $6.7 million, three days; $8.1 million, four days; $89.3 million, fourth week
- Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, $5.8 million, three days; $7.8 million, four days; $120.8 million, fifth week
- War Horse, $ 5.6 million, three days; $7.2 million, four days; $67.3 million, fourth week
- The Iron Lady, $5.4 million, three days; $6.5 million, four days; $7.1 million, third week