The cartoon birds soared; the slashers got diced and sliced. Rio, the 3-D animated feature about two macaws that fall in love during a Brazilian carnival, flew tantalizingly close to an elusive box-office ceiling with an announced first weekend of $40 million, according to early estimates by the movie’s producers, 20th Century-Fox and Blue Sky Studios. That number was more than double the take of Rio’s nearest competitor Scre4m, The Weinstein Company’s reboot of its ’90s horror comedy franchise.
If the Rio figure is confirmed Monday, when the final actual weekend tallies are issued, it will mark the first time in 2011 that a film has earned as much as $40 million in a weekend — a number that was exceeded nine times in the same period last year. What’s certain is that this weekend’s box-office total will be higher than the same frame in 2010 for only the second time in this slumping year.
In Indieland, where the NPR crowd goes for its cinematic haute cuisine, The Conspirator broke into the weekend’s top 10 with $3.9 million at 707 theaters. This courtroom drama, directed by Robert Redford, might have been called The Lincoln Lawyer; it’s a fact-based story, set in 1865, of a young attorney defending Mary Surratt on the charge that that she harbored the men who killed Abraham Lincoln. Made for about $25 million, The Conspirator had a strong per-screen average of $5,500.
One other film in limited release boasted an even burlier per-screen average of $5,600. That was perhaps the year’s most improbable production: Atlas Shrugged Part I, an adaptation of the 1957 Ayn Rand novel that has long been deemed “unfilmable” — and if you want proof, see this version. Yet there’s a market for the movie, since Rand’s Objectivist philosophy has found powerful adherents in federal and state governments, in right-wing think tanks and in the mythical but influential country of Glennbeckistan. Finishing 14th this week with $1.7 million in just 300 theaters, Atlas Shrugged may vie with Soul Surfer to be the year’s top out-of-nowhere, faith-based hit.
Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. Rio, $40 million, first weekend
2. Scre4m, $19.3 million, first weekend
3. Hop, $11.2 million; $82.6 million, second week
4. Soul Surfer, $7.4 million; $20 million, second week
5. Hanna, $7.3 million; $23.3 million, second week
6. Arthur, $6.94 million; $22.3 million, second week
7. Insidious, $6.86 million; $36 million, third week
8. Source Code, $6.3 million; $37 million, third week
9. The Conspirator, $3.9 million, first weekend
10. Your Highness, $3.9 million; $15.95 million, second week See TIME’s 140 best Twitter feeds.
See TIME’s Top 10 Everything of 2010.
