Weekend Box Office (09-09-12): The Words is top opener in painfully weak weekend.

Maybe The Gangster Squad should have stayed put after all.  Its cowardly desertion of this weekend following the Aurora shootings  (it originally climaxed with a movie theater shootings) left September 4th without a major opener and none of the big action releases over the next month (Looper, End of Watch, Dredd, etc.) stepped up to the plate, leaving a vacuum.  As a result, this was the lowest-grossing weekend in several years (which just proves - it's the movies, stupid!).  The top opener of the weak was The Words, a CBS Films drama starring Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, and Olivia Wilde.  All solid names but none save for Cooper qualifying as box office (Saldana sells in action, but not quiet drama).  The badly reviewed literary plagiarism vehicle both seems like the kind of character-driven drama we claim to want more of as well as the kind of thing (especially due to the reviews) that will play just fine on DVD in three months.  So its $5 million opening weekend is unfortunate, if not a surprise.  The film cost just $6 million and was an acquisition, so CBS's financial damages are limited to marketing and distribution.