Holiday Estimates: “Virtue” Tops “Experience”; “Summer,” “Brothers” Bloom (UPDATED)
by Peter Knegt (May 25, 2009)
A scene from Stephan Elliott's "Easy Virtue." Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
While Ben Stiller and the Terminator battled it out in Hollywood (with Ben Stiller the surprise champion), Indiewood’s Memorial Day weekend had a clear box office winner in Stephan Elliott’s “Easy Virtue.” According to estimates, the Noel Coward adaptation grossed a classy $146,140 on 10 screens. Released by Sony Pictures Classics, “Virtue” - which stars Ben Barnes, Jessica Biel and Kristen Scott Thomas - averaged $14,614 over the four-day weekend, easily the highest among all specialty releases. Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” didn’t have such an easy time. The Magnolia Pictures release - perhaps hindered by the fact that it’s been available on Video-On-Demand for weeks now, grossed a so-so $200,000 from 30 screens, averaging $6,667. But while that’s a far cry from the $30,535 Soderbergh’s “Che” opened to this past winter, it’s impressive in comparison to the much more similar release of “Bubble” in 2006. That film - also released by Magnolia, and on simultaneous platforms - averaged only $2,208 in its first weekend. Though it certainly didn’t have the sex appeal that is Sasha Grey (or the rather genius tagline of “See It With Someone You F**k). Other openers included Sony Classics’ Cannes 2008 pickup “O’Horten,” which grossed $32,937 on 8 screens over the 4 days, averaging a mild $4,117. And Oscilloscope Laboratories’ release of “Burma VJ” found reasonable numbers. The doc, which tells the story of the 2007 protests in Burma by thousands of monks, grossed $7,554 at the Film Forum in New York over the four-day weekend, and $9,886 since opening Wednesday. Meanwhile, two holdovers held up very nicely - both seeming poised to become summer breakouts for their distributors. Summit Entertainment’s release of “The Brothers Bloom” went from 4 to 52 screens this weekend and grossed a stellar $527,000, placing it 15th overall. Its $10,154 average - a reasonable 50% drop from last weekend, and the second highest of any limited release after “Virtue” - helped bring the Rian Johnson total to $651,388 as it heads into a month of expansion.
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