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.

Weekend Box Office (08/19/12) - The Expendables 2 tops while ParaNorman and Sparkle mostly shine.

It's no real surprise that The Expendables 2 (review/trailer) opened with about 18% less this weekend ($28.75 million) than the first Expendables on this weekend in 2010 ($34 million).  The Expendables (review) was a culmination of a good twenty years of 'what-if' anticipation.  And while the final result was a little lacking, in that it was barely a good movie and most of the biggest action icons were either absent or had cameos, it was still enough of a wish-fulfillment fantasy to be a massive worldwide hit ($274 million on a $80 million budget).  Two years later, the sequel delivers on both the action front (lots more of it) and the A-level casting arena (Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger have expanded roles while Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme came to play) but that initial high is somewhat gone.  Still, a $28 million debut, especially from Lionsgate, is nothing to sneeze at. This will still be their largest non-Saw/Tyler Perry opening outside of The Expendables and The Hunger Games and their tenth-biggest debut ever.  Not only have we seen a pattern of lower opening weekends and domestic totals for sequels, but this is easily the kind of property that could have elicited a giant 'no one cares anymore' reaction after the somewhat underwhelming first film (I seem to be among the few who likes it).