weekend box office: ‘Inside Man’ steals the limelight from ‘Vendetta’

Washington and Lee on the set of ‘Inside Man’

Insert joke about daylight robbery here: Spike Lee’s latest flick, the heist drama Inside Man, cleaned up at the box office over the weekend, running away with about $29 million. It’s the biggest opening ever for Lee (as well as for his star, Denzel Washington) -- what kind of impact will that have on Lee’s career? Well, as he told This Is London last week, before the film opened:

Freedom in Hollywood equates to money, which equates to power. So I don't know how powerful or how free I am because there are still things I want to get made that I can't secure the finances for.

Maybe he’ll have an easier time finding financing now...

V for Vendetta was the number 2 flick of the weekend, but it took a pretty precipitous drop in the money-raked-in department, selling a little over $12 million in tickets. Which should satisfy those who see the world in black and white, like Rick Scarborough, president of something called Vision America and organizer of The War On Christians And The Values Voter In 2006 conference, who told Dakota Voice:

Here you have a movie -- 'V for Vendetta' -- with one of the strongest anti-Christian messages we've seen in a long time. The movie depicts a future Christian dictatorship in Britain that crushes dissent and persecutes other faiths. No such regime exists anywhere in the world. Nor could it.

Not that they’re not trying: Vision America is against government forcing religion on its citizens... as long as the government is in Afghanistan and is persecuting Christians, but is totally for it as long as the government is American and is forcing Christianity on non-Christians.

[box office results via Yahoo! Movies]