North American box office: forecast is good for ‘Cloudy’

I never did my box office wrapups for last week, and now I feel like I’ve got one shoe tied tighter than the other.

Overall business was up 14 percent over the same weekend last year, mostly thanks to Cloudy and its higher-priced IMAX and 3D tickets: without those premiums, the flick’s numbers wouldn’t have looked quite so good. The rest of the new offerings just plain didn’t look so great: The Informant! was on the low end of openings for both Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon, though it really is more an arthouse-type flick than the blockbusters that have given them their big opening-weekend numbers.

On a per-screen basis, Jane Campion’s lovely new movie about John Keats, Bright Star, was the winner, taking in $9,984 on each of 19 screens... and without, of course, the IMAX/3D premium that put Cloudy in second place, with $9,716 (at each of 3,119 locations). Romantic poetry and chaste romance in IMAX and 3D is an intriguing idea, though. A thing of beauty could be a six-story-tall eye-popping visual spectacle as well as a joy forever...

Inglourious Basterds passed $110 million this weekend, making it Quentin Tarantino’s highest grossing movie to date. He’ll really be insufferable now.

[numbers via Box Office Mojo]