The Weekend Report: May 31, 2009

Up was away up as it entered the marketplace with an estimated $67.8 million to command weekend ticket sales. The session also saw the national bow of the horror parable Drag Me to Hell, which ranked third with $16.7 million. Revenues overall were essentially flat from 2008 (to be rigorous; -0.5%).

Regionally there was a strong bow for the Swedish thriller Millenium, which grossed $312,000 from 42 screens in Quebec. Limited openers were few with the debut of this year’s foreign-language winner Departures from Japan off to good start of $53,700 from eight venues.

For months there’s been a drumbeat in the press that Up would be the long awaited stumble in the unerring success streak that been experienced by Pixar. Largely based upon the film’s storyline, the reckoning boiled down to a public indifference to an octogenarian hero and, one suspects, the inevitably that the company has to eventually experience failure. After all, apart from Toy Story, it’s been adverse to bowdlerizing past success with umpteen sequels and retreads.

Some pundits let their gut get the best of them with “dire” predictions of $50 million as the sign of vulnerability. The biggest surprise turned out to be the film’s PG rating, which a Disney exec guessed was based upon the terror (but not anything bloody or lethal) of an attack by guard dogs. And not surprisingly the film’s 3D engagements (roughly half of the total) out-paced conventional playdates by more than three times.

The frame’s counter-programmer -- the enthusiastically reviewed Drag Me to Hell -- performed with predictable potency. The upbeat reviews and word-of-mouth are likely to extend the film’s theatrical life though fall short of crossing over to a significantly larger crowd.

Weekend box office revenues should settle at about $175 million for a 4% decline from the three-day portion of last weekend’s Memorial holiday. It was ever so slightly down from last year when the launch of Sex and the City generated $56.8 million and counter-programmer The Strangers entered in third spot with a $21 million gross.

There were relatively consistent post-holiday drop offs of 50% to 60% for holdover titles with Star Trek holding a bit better than the rest of the albeit thin list of titles in wide release. The equally slender agenda of alternative niche movies that includes The Brothers Bloom, Easy Virtue and Summer Hours were doing well, maintaining the real estate value of that limited geography.

Though it’s yet to secure U.S. distribution, Swedish nail-biter Millenium (aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) had an impressive debut in Quebec. The film’s been enormously successful in its limited international exposure in Scandinavia, France, Belgium and Switzerland with a $45 million gross to date. Still it’s tough for this type of mainstream foreign film to crack the domestic marketplace as evidenced in recent years by the likes of District 13 and Crimson Rivers.