By Ryan Parsons | Image property of Lionsgate, Variety
My Bloody Valentine 3-D
Lots of big winners at the box office over the weekend including My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Gran Torino and Notorious. With a little help from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s spirit, all four of these films performed above expected.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Box Office
Mall Cop took the top spot with $33.8 million. Further proving that family films are the way to go in a down economy. Coming in at second, Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino continues to show impressive gas mileage by dropping a miniscule 25% in its second frame of wide release to earn another $22.2 million. The low-budget film's box office cume now idles at $73.2 million.
Representing the widest 3-D release to date, My Bloody Valentine barely nabbed the third spot with $21.9 million. If fans weren't feeling like horror in the third dimension, there was a good chance they caught the biopic Notorious, which took the number four spot over the weekend with $21.5 million.
Thanks to the film's strong per-location average, Notorious's opening is the biggest ever for Fox Searchlight.
The strong box office showing continues down to the fifth spot, which was claimed by Paramount's family comedy Hotel for Dogs. In its opening bow, the film came in ahead of expectations with $17.7 million.
While the Martin Luther King, Jr. deserves some credit for the success of all these films, it looks like each of the top five offered something a little different than the rest of the pack. Lionsgate, for one, credits the use of 3-D for My Bloody Valentine's box office prowess.
"This is the first time horror fans have gotten something in 3-D," Lionsgate prexy of distribution Steve Rothenberg said, speaking of the digital iteration of the format
Thanks to the strong numbers, this weekend's box office was up a whopping 31% over last year.
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