Thunder of the low, distant variety shook movie theaters, and lightning bolts pulsed out from 3-D screens, as Thor earned $66 million at North American theaters to win the year’s first full May weekend, according to early studio estimates. The latest in Marvel Studios’ master plan to make a blockbuster film out of every character who has appeared in the company’s comic books over the past 50 years, Thor easily trounced the weekend’s two romantic comedies, Jumping the Broom and Something Borrowed, while dumping Mel Gibson’s comeback film The Beaver into indie Hell. The Marvel god-dude registered the second highest opening gross of 2011, behind the $86.3 million scored last weekend by the automotive heist film Fast Five.
Not so much a muscle car of a movie, more a muscle chariot, Thor is the rare Marvel project to borrow its superhero from classical antiquity. Battling his scheming brother Loki and their dad Odin , Thor strides out of the Norse heavens, as reimagined in 1962 by Marvel mythmaker Stan Lee, and into modern-day New Mexico, where he finds new adversaries and a terrestrial girl friend . The movie marks the first episode in Marvel’s Avengers series, with Captain America opening in July, The Avengers due this same weekend next year and Nick Fury in summer 2012. If the grand scheme works, Marvel could have enough preternatural tough guys to populate a dozen megamovies in the next few years. and expect her dwindling fan base to show up.
But no star’s fan base is baser than Mel Gibson’s, so tested have his admirers been by his tabloid antics of domestic abuse and anti-Jewish rants. The Beaver, a strange parable about a toy manufacturer who battles severe depression by speaking through a rodent hand-puppet, was meant to test the audience’s tolerance for an actor they supported for a burly quarter-century. Directed by and costarring Jodie Foster, the movie earned a meager $104,000 in 22 theaters, on a limited platform before its wider release in two weeks. If this is Mel’s big comeback vehicle, it stalled in the garage.
Even in his movie-star years, Gibson took occasional detours into risky indie projects: he graced Wim Wenders’ meta-flaky Million Dollar Hotel, did a cameo in the Robert Downey, Jr., feature-film version of The Singing Detective and played a misanthrope hermit in The Man Without a Face, which he also directed. It’s likely that The Beaver would find few patrons no matter who took the leading role. If Hollywood moguls really cared to test Gibson’s tarnished allure, they’d put him in a Mad Max or Lethal Weapon sequel. But no movie studio is likely to take an expensive flyer on a 55-year-old who can’t control his hands or his mouth. Mel Gibson is no Thor.
Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:
1. Thor, $66 million, first weekend
2. Fast Five, $32.5 million; $139.9 million, second week
3. Jumping the Broom, $13.7 million, first weekend
4. Something Borrowed, $13.2 million, first weekend
5. Rio, $8.2 million; $114.9 million, fourth week
6. Water for Elephants, $5.6 million; $41.6 million, third week
7. Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family, $3.9 million; $46.8 million, third week
8. Prom, $2.4 million; $7.8 million, second week
9. Soul Surfer, $2.1 million; $36.7 million, fifth week
10. Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil, $1.9 million; $6.7 million, second week See the world’s most influential people in the 2011 TIME 100.
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