North American box office: ‘Friday the 13th’ slays

The box-office bonanza continues: this was the busiest Presidents’ Day weekend in the history of Hollywood, and also the biggest February weekend ever. Friday the 13th enjoyed the biggest opening ever for a slasher movie, though, as Box Office Mojo points out, when you adjust for inflation, other horror movies had bigger opening-weekend crowds.

I’m sorry to see the classy The International debut so low down on the roster, at No. 8, taking in only $10.7 million, even less than the second week of the new Pink Panther movie, which is by all accounts an atrocity.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop finally dropped out of the top 5, but the overall weekend was so strong that the film still took in $13.6 million at No. 6, and has now passed $100 million. Which has never happened before for a movie initially released in January. I hated the movie, but I still find something totally enthralling about the fact that people seem more excited about movies of late.

I’d say that bodes well for all movies, but as I noted in a “question of the day” earlier this week, the rising box-office tide is generally not raising the boats of indie and arthouse films. I wonder if we’ll start to see films not intended to be crowd-pleasers for adolescent audiences get even more limited releases and even shorter runs as a prelude to DVD and PPV runs, or even if we’ll see more simultaneous day-and-date theatrical and home releases of these movies. Then again, grownup movies seem to hold their own in the U.K., so perhaps it’s a matter of marketing rather than a lack of audience interest...

[numbers via Box Office Mojo]