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By Daniel Frankel
TheWrap
With release activity at the domestic box office heating up for the holidays and the awards season, Friday saw soft openings for Disney's expensive 3D stop-motion-animated "A Christmas Carol" and Overture's ensemble satire "The Men Who Stare at Goats."
Universal, meanwhile, seemed to benefit from the current public interest in verite-style sci-fi/horror, with paranormally themed "The Fourth Kind" enjoying a better-than-expected premiere. Also, Lionsgate awards hopeful "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' By Sapphire" finished an impressive 12th overall at the Friday box office, taking in $592,000 playing at only 18 theaters spread out across New York, L.A., Chicago and Atlanta.
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The Michael Jackson concert-rehearsal movie "This Is It" dropped 41 percent from its first Friday in release, finishing in fourth place with $4.2 million.
But amid a competitive Friday North American box office that was up 41 percent overall, according to one studio report, it was Disney which had the most to win or lose.
Shot for more than $180 million in filmmaker Robert Zemeckis' favored 3D stop-motion style, and featuring Jim Carrey in numerous voice roles, including Scrooge, the latest adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" took in just $8.9 million Friday. That was good enough to lead the box office, but put the Disney film on pace for a projected weekend opening of only about $32.5 million, according to rival-studio data.
The movie opened in a record number of digital 3D theaters, 2,045 all told. But unless its current pace gets a huge bump on Saturday, a big movie day for family audiences, its opening will barely exceed that of Disney's last 3D effort, last summer's Jerry Bruckheimer-produced "G-Force," a $150 million film that opened to $31.7 million and finished with an unprofitable $203.4 million worldwide box-office haul.
For its part, Overture will undoubtedly make money on "The Men Who Stare at Goats," despite the fact that it took in just $4.6 million Friday, putting the satire on pace to finish the weekend well below the $15 million-$18 million that tracking projections had predicted for it. A comedy about a secretive new-age army division starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, Overture paid just $5 million for North American distribution rights to the movie.
Meanwhile, the alien-abduction-themed "The Fourth Kind" opened to $5 million and is on pace to far exceed the $10 million weekend total Universal officials said they'd be more than pleased with.
Produced by Gold Circle and distributed in the U.S. by Universal, the film was put into production well before Paramount's similarly toned "Paranormal Activity" became a viral phenomenon. However, Universal's marketing campaign for "The Fourth Kind" has also been similar to "Paranormal" in tone and Internet involvement, and that looks like it might be paying off.
For its part, "Paranormal" looks like it finally may be fading a bit, dropping 53 percent week to week with a $2.8 million Friday. But the film, shot for under $15,000, and sweetened and marketed by Paramount for less than $15 million, will exceed $100 million domestically within the week.
Despite the drop, "Paranormal's" weekend performance is on pace to narrowly beat another new sci-fi/horror entry, "The Box."
The Warner-distributed film, which stars Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and Frank Langella, took in $2.8 million Friday and will finish the weekend at well below $10 million.
Majority-financed by Media Rights Capital, Warner has only a small stake in the movie, which costs about $30 million to produce.
Here's a look at how the top 10 at the Friday box office performed:
Disney's "A Christmas Carol" ($8.9 mil.)
"The Fourth Kind" ($5.0 mil.)
"The Men Who Stare at Goats" ($4.6 mil.)
"Michael Jackson's This Is It" ($4.2 mil.)
"The Box" ($2.8 mil.)
"Paranormal Activity" ($2.8 mil.)
"Couples Retreat" ($2.0 mil.)
"Law Abiding Citizen" ($1.9 mil.)
"Where the Wild Things Are" ($1.2 mil.)
"Astro Boy" ($0.6 mil.)
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