'Falls' Rises
Sony/Columbia's horror movie Darkness Falls, which drew horrible reviews on Friday, may have topped the box office with $12 million in ticket sales, but the real weekend winner may have been the Miramax musical Chicago, which wound up in third place with $8.2 million, despite the fact that it was being screened in only 616 theaters. The film averaged $13,375 per theater, more than three times the $4,239 average of Darkness. Miramax's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the only other film to be released wide (following showcase screenings in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar nods), performed reasonably well as it earned $5.8 million on 1,769 screens, or an average of $3,297. The box office was clobbered by the Super Bowl, with admissions dropping to a trickle on Sunday. Nevertheless, the $80 million gross for the weekend for the top 12 movies was up 1.8 percent from a year earlier, when there was no competition from the Super Bowl. |
