It was yet another 'photo-finish' at the box office over this President's Day weekend, but as always, it's the hard numbers rather than the arbitrary rankings that matter. But since we need to decide which movies to discuss first, in order we shall go! For the moment, it appears that Safe House will top the charts in its second weekend after barely missing the top slot last weekend. It grossed $23.9 million over the Fri-Sun weekend and $28 million over the holiday. Safe House will have grossed $82 million by Monday, a rather huge total for Mr. Washington. In just eleven days, Safe House is Washington's 7th-biggest grosser, out-grossing such films as Training Day ($76 million), Man On Fire ($77 million), and Unstoppable ($81 million). Barring a complete collapse, Safe House should become Denzel Washington's fifth $100 million grosser over the next weekend, with an outside shot of eclipsing the $130 million gross of American Gangster, which is currently his top grosser. While we can debate how much credit co-star Ryan Reynolds gets for this one (he certainly didn't hurt...), Safe House is already his fourth-biggest grosser and will likely out-gross Green Lantern's $116 million total in a few weeks. I'm frankly shocked at the strong legs for this one, as it's certainly one of Washington's worst genre entries in a long career with a number of solid adult-skewing action pictures (it looks like it was shot through a puke filter and edited in a blender, plus the script is so generic it could have been written in a Mad Libs book). Still, star-power is a rare thing these days, and Denzel Washington clearly has it.
