America Feels the 'Burn'
It's a special day for moviegoers — the first time in three weeks those studio jokers didn't leave the equivalent of a flaming bag of crap on our doorstep Friday morning. Thanks, Hollywood! Their reward? One of the best non-Labor Day September weekends in years, as illustrated by our regular browse through the Monday Morning Box Office: 1. Burn After Reading — $19.4 million The Coen brothers' admirable, totally nonsensical spy farce rode its all-star ensemble like a rented mule, albeit sort of a haunting mutation of mule — one with frosted tips, a hoof-full of Oscars and an unusually foul mouth that nevertheless enticed enough curious viewers to make Burn the biggest opening of the Coens' career. And it's almost enough to settle Focus Features' therapy bill incurred after Hamlet 2.2. Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys — $18 million Add another fun fact to Defamer's Tyler Perry Encyclopedia: Five of his six films have now opened among their respective weekends' top two grossers. On roughly two-thirds as many screens as this week's No. 1. With virtually no white people in the audience. Be impressed. 3. Righteous Kill — $16.5 million And it would have been even more had Robert De Niro and Al Pacino not already fulfilled most Americans' demand to see them sleepwalk through scenes together. 4. The Women — $10 million Critics be damned — Picturehouse was determined to make this work if it was the last thing it ever did. And, alas, it was. 5. The House Bunny — $4.3 million The Cult of Anna Faris kept her in the Top 5 with barely a 20% drop from last week. Seriously: If Tyler Perry had an adventurous bone in his body he'd write her into a Madea film and let the Brinks truck do the rest.