'Enchanted' Gobbles Up Post-Thanksgiving Box Office Leftovers
In another one of those post-Thanksgiving weekends at the box office in which Hollywood serves up the cinematic equivalent of mold-encrusted stuffing and rancid cranberry sauce, the moviegoing public largely chose to stay home and avoid a grudging feast on studio leftovers. Have a look at the anemic numbers from a slow three days at the multiplex, which Box Office Mojo says was "the least attended in a decade":
1. Enchanted - $17.023 million
Rather than drag their children back to theaters to watch Disney send up decades of its relentlessly cheery, emotionally dishonest fairy tales, parents instead plopped the kids in front of the TV with a stack of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Little Mermaid DVDs, instructing the tykes to erupt in cynical laughter each time any of the films' obviously delusional heroines breaks into song to explain how much better her life will be once her prince shows up to save her.
2. This Christmas - $8.4 million
3. Beowulf - $7.882 million
One day, envelope-pushing filmmaker Robert Zemeckis will apply his groundbreaking motion-capture technology to attempt to reinvigorate the stagnant "home for the holidays" genre, working under the theory that tiresome bickering around the dinner table and Christmas tree will seem far more compelling if dramatized by digitally rendered actors with disturbingly dead eyes that reveal the soul-draining effects of years of family dysfunction.
4. Awake - $6.011 million
Kudos to Awake director Joby Harold, who realized that the best utilization of star Hayden Christensen's abilities would be to strap him to a hospital bed while paralyzed by an anesthetic coma, aware of the scenes unfolding around him but unable to woodenly interact with his fellow castmates.
5. Hitman - $5.8 million
A brief debate in last week's box office report seems to have ended in consensus about the Timothy Olyphant vs. Vin Diesel question: while Diesel probably would have been the bigger draw, the marble-mouthed onetime action star can't equal either Olyphant's dramatic chops or his trademarked brand of clenched-jaw sex appeal.