North American box office: ‘G.I. Joe’ no!

Last week I predicted a 70-percent drop for Funny People in its second week, and I wasn’t far off. This really depresses me: I rail against performers like Adam Sandler going for the stupid all the time, but that’s obviously what audiences want. They’re not even willing to give someone they clearly love, like Sandler, the time of day if he deviates even slightly from what they expect. I mean, I get the whole “Life is shit and I just wanna escape, gimme sumthin stupid to laugh at” thing. But is that all mainstream audiences want? Is it impossible for even Adam Sandler, poster boy for idiocy, to satisfy audiences with a movie that isn’t entirely subimbecilic?

I guess it isn’t.

I’ll be watching to see what happens with G.I. Joe next week. The weekend estimate released on Sunday for the full weekend -- which would have included actual box-office results for Friday and Saturday plus an estimate for Sunday -- was off once the actual Sunday numbers were in. Paramount guessed G.I. Joe would have a weekend of $56.2 million, but that was off by $1.5 million... which means that word-of-mouth was bad, and that Sunday attendance was not as good as one might have estimated from the Friday-Saturday actuals, if the geekboys who’d ponied up on Friday-Saturday (plus Thursday midnight screenings) had told all their friends they really liked the movie. It’s what happens when attendees early in the weekend tell their pals, “Eh, you can skip it.”

I hope we see a big drop in Joe next weekend, because it will mean that even fanboys can resist being pandered to. I’m not actually expecting a drop of more than 50 percent, though.

It’s nice to see that Julie & Julia earned back half its budget in its first weekend domestically. Joe earned back only one-third of its production costs. Then again, there won’t be any J&J toys to rake in dough. Doh!

Then again, even though A Perfect Getaway debuted way down at No. 7, its cheapness to make -- $14 million -- means it did way better, relatively speaking, than Joe did: it took in a smidge under $6 million, 43 percent of its production budget.

Joe did have the best per-screen average, though, by far: $13,654 at 4,007 locations. Among wide released, J&J was a distant second, at $8,508 at 2,354 venues. That’s depressing, too.

[numbers via Box Office Mojo]