Suddenly, it’s 1979, when Steven Spielberg was the kid with the magic touch, and science fiction movies invested their alien encounters with emotional uplift. Super 8, the J.J. Abrams creature feature set in that more innocent time and produced by Spielberg — and directly inspired by the young master’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — finished first at the North American box office with a $37 million opening weekend, according to early studio estimates. That number exceeded Paramount’s conservative prediction of $30 million and was close to the forecasts of most industry handicappers, except for Forbes.com’s Jason Raznick, who hallucinated an opening of between $70 million and $85 million. The film did super, but not that super.
For a movie so widely hyped and critically acclaimed
And if you’re wondering how the movie’s obvious progenitor did in its opening frame back in June 1982, E.T. earned $11.8 million
