Let the 2010 movie year finally begin! After nearly two months of Avatar taking on new challengers each week and demolishing them.
All with the ease of Ken Jennings during his Jeopardy! run, the all-time box office champ slipped to fourth place, as a trio of new pictures, each aimed at a specific part of the mass audience, attracted sizable crowds.
The $193 million predicted for the Friday-to-Sunday frame is the most ever for a President's Day weekend.
The critically reviled but demographically savvy Valentine's Day set a seasonal record with $52.4 million for the first three days of the long weekend, according to studio estimates.
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the first film from Rick Riordan's best-selling tetralogy, lured kids and their parents, with an oversize $31.2 million. Males with no kids and no dates went to the R-rated period horror film The Wolfman, which earned a respectable $30.6 million.
This marks the first weekend that three new films were on top since March 20-22, 2009, when Knowing, I Love You, Man and Duplicity headed the chart. Rather than attempt holiday fare themed to U.S. Commanders in Chief (Vince Vaughn as Abe Lincoln? Denzel Washington as George Washington?), director Garry Marshall found an ensemble romantic-comedy script, similar to the 2003 Brit film Love, Actually, and assembled an A-list crowd of actors: Jamie Foxx and Queen Latifah, Julia Roberts and her niece Emma, two Jessicas (Alba and Garner), two baby Taylors (Lautner and Swift) and prime dudes named Ashton, Bradley and Topher, with 75-year-old Shirley MacLaine added for the senior set. (Marshall is also 75; kitsch knows no age barriers.)
The result was a candygram filled with high fructose corn syrup and reviled by reviewers; the movie rated an abysmal 15% on the Rotten Tomatoes poll of critics. To Jim Slotek of Jam! Movies it was "a rom-com monstrosity"; Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum dubbed it "Crap, Actually"; and virtually every other reviewer approached Valentine's Day as if it were VD. But look: if audiences followed critics, the weekend's top movie (100% on Rotten Tomatoes) would have been American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein. Marshall can trash-compact those notices and frame his royalty checks. The film will have earned as much this weekend as it cost to make. Hollywood will gladly take heaps of abuse, as long as the profit margin is even bigger.
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