The Break-Up tops US box office
Story by Jack Foley
JENNIFER Aniston-Vince Vaughn comedy The Break-Up performed ahead of expectation at the US box office at the weekend by knocking X-Men: The Last Stand from the top spot.
Buoyed by ongoing tabloid speculation about a real-life romance, the comedy took an estimated $38.1 million to just beat X-Men, which amassed $34.4 million.
Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal Pictures, put the film’s performance down to the continued fan interest in Jennifer Aniston since her much-publicised split from Brad Pitt last year and her reported romance that began with Vaughn while filming The Break-Up.
“They’re always in the press,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Every time you turn around, somebody’s talking about Jennifer, or Jennifer and Brad, or Jennifer and Vince. It’s not why we made the movie, though.”
According to Rocco, The Break-Up – which focuses on the fall-out from the end of a relationship between Aniston and Vaughn – took about $10 million more than anticipated.
X-Men: The Last Stand still posted impressive figures, following its record four-day debut of $122.9 million over the Memorial Day weekend.
Its total now stands at an almighty $175.7 million in just 10 days, an amount it took X2: X-Men United 18 days to reach.
A delighted Bruce Snyder, head of distribution for Twentieth Century Fox, predicted that the film – which is said to be the final one in the trilogy – should top out at between $240 million and $250 million, beating the $157 million take for the original and the $215 million for X2.
Snyder added that the decline in the second weekend was typical given how many people saw the movie over the holiday weekend.
Another box office success has been DreamWorks Animation’s latest comedy Over the Hedge, which lies in third place at the box office with $20.6 million. Its three-week total now stands at $112.4 million following the best reviews for the studio since Shrek.
And the cash juggernaut that is Sony’s The Da Vinci Code hung in there at number four with $19.3 million, lifting its three-week domestic gross to $172.7 million.
Worldwide, Ron Howard’s film, which has been adapted from Dan Brown’s best-seller, has so far grossed $581 million in spite of the controversy and poor reviews surrounding it. Rory Bruer, head of distribution at Sony, predicted that it should hit at least $750 million globally.
The figures make much better reading for Hollywood compared to this time last year, when movie attendance dropped by eight per cent.
This year’s attendance is running about one per cent ahead of last year’s, with what looks like a solid crop of blockbusters still to come, including Pixar’s latest animated offering Cars and Bryan Singer’s eagerly-anticipated Superman Returns on June 30.