'Ocean's Thirteen' Tops 'Pirates' With $37.1 Million at Box Office
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Audiences anted up for the Warner Bros. caper "Ocean's Thirteen," the third of George Clooney and Brad Pitt's casino-heist romps, which debuted as the top flick with $37.1 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," the No. 1 movie the previous two weekends, sank to second-place with $21.3 million, raising its domestic total to $253.6 million.
Sony's "Surf's Up," an animated adventure about surfing penguins featuring the voices of Shia LaBeouf and Jeff Bridges, debuted in fourth-place with $18 million. That was less than half the $41.5 million opening weekend of last fall's animated-penguin hit "Happy Feet."
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"Surf's Up" earned good reviews, but audiences may have viewed it as a retread of "Happy Feet," which finished with nearly $200 million domestically and won the Academy Award for best animated feature.
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Lionsgate's gory horror sequel "Hostel: Part II," about rich people who pay to kill victims in grisly ways, opened at No. 6 with $8.75 million, less than half the $19.6 million debut of last year's "Hostel."
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The newcomers fell well short of the $60.1 million opening of the animated hit "Cars" over the same weekend last year. After a big summer start, Hollywood revenues dipped for the second-straight weekend, with the top-12 movies taking in $133.6 million, down 9 percent from the same weekend last year.
The three blockbusters that debuted in May — "Pirates of the Caribbean," DreamWorks Animation's "Shrek the Third" and Sony's "Spider-Man 3" — all have trailed off with big drops in revenue after huge first weekends.
Collectively, the three movies will combine for about $1 billion in domestic receipts. But all three will finish well below the $400-million-plus haul each of their most-successful predecessors took in.
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The latest installments on all three franchises earned mixed reviews, and they arrived amid arguably the most-competitive summer ever for Hollywood, with huge sequels and other big films arriving every weekend.
With "Spider-Man 3" edging toward $900 million worldwide and "At World's End" nearing $750 million, overseas revenues have far exceeded domestic receipts for both franchises. "Shrek the Third" is rolling out overseas gradually.
"It's really become an opening-weekend business, but with all the competition, in the long haul, they just don't have the legs that their predecessors did," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "Studios really have to rely on those worldwide grosses to make up the difference in the long run."
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An exception is Universal's comedy "Knocked Up," which held up strongly in its second weekend with $20 million, coming in at No. 3 and raising its domestic total to $66.2 million. Critical praise and audience word of mouth sustained the film, which stars Katherine Heigl as a career woman who becomes pregnant from a one-night stand with a slacker (Seth Rogen).
"Ocean's Thirteen" reunites director Steven Soderbergh with Clooney, Pitt, Matt Damon and other cast members as the gang of thieves targets a casino owner (Al Pacino) who double-crossed one of their own.
The sequel debuted slightly behind the opening weekends of 2001's "Ocean's Eleven" ($38.1 million) and 2004's "Ocean's Twelve" ($39.2 million).
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Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "Ocean's Thirteen," $37.1 million.
2. "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," $21.3 million.
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3. "Knocked Up," $20 million.
4. "Surf's Up," $18 million.
5. "Shrek the Third," $15.75 million.
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6. "Hostel: Part II," $8.75 million.
7. "Mr. Brooks," $5 million.
8. "Spider-Man 3," $4.4 million.
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9. "Waitress," $1.65 million.
10. "Disturbia," $550,000.