Movies News
Weekend box-office: Museum gets stomped
By Scott Rosenberg
Jan 15, 2007, 1:17 GMT

It must be getting quite embarrassing for the Hollywood studios. Once again this weekend, only one new opener made the top box-office five, ‘Stomp the Yard.’

The lively, African American oriented movie on “stepping,” a high-energy dance style popular among black fraternities and sororities, hit the top of the chart pulling in $22 million from 2,051 locations.

Distributor Columbia Pictures (a unit of Sony) said “Stomp” cost approximately $14 million to make. They added that 65 percent of this weekend’s audience was black but the film played strongly among all demographics.

Sony/Screen Gems ‘Stomp the Yard’ out maneuvered Fox’s ‘Night at the Museum’ sending “Museum” to a lowly second place take of $17.1 million from 3,612 locations.  The good news is however, the romp through the “Museum” which stars Ben Stiller has pulled in $185,756,000 in its four weeks of release.

Hanging on to Museum’s coattails ,as it has for the last three weeks, is the Will Smith melodrama ‘The Pursuit of Happyness,’ garnering $9.1 million from 3,169 theaters. Now in its fifth week of release, "Happyness" has raked in $134,479,000. This week’s take dropped 29.4 percent from last week.

Finally in wide release, the Broadway musical brought to the big screen by Paramount and Dreamworks, ‘Dreamgirls’ rose to fourth place with a take of $8,122,000 from 1,907 locations.

And while ‘Dreamgirls’ continues to rack up award nominations, Paramount was in contest with itself this weekend as the fifth place holder is another Paramount pic, the Hilary Swank starer ‘Freedom Writers’ which took in $7,117,000 from 2,179 theaters.

Also opening this week-end, coming in seventh place was the chilling ‘Alpha Dog’ starring Justin Timberlake. “Dog” opened with $6.1 million from 1,200 locations mostly packed with young females "ogling" Justin Timberlake – Universal estimates the female demographic attending at 53%.

In eighth place was the thriller ‘Primeval,’ the story of a killer croc in its first release week. The "croc shock" movie which stars Orlando Jones and “Prison Break” star Dominic Purcell took in almost $6 million from 2,444 locations. 

Disney released the thriller without advance screening to critics – a sure sign impending doom awaited pic upon release.

The critically acclaimed ‘Arthur and the Invisibles,’ from French director Luc Besson, with an all star voice cast faired poorly in its freshman weekend release, pulling in $4.3 million from 2,247 locations.  MGM released the movie for the Weinstein Company

Weinstein Company co-owner Harvey Weinstein said the American family audience is not used to films that combine animation and live action. While the film was off to a slow start, he was heartened by strong exit polls.