BOX OFFICE: 21 has the winning hand!

Kevin Spacey has helped the casino thriller 21 top the box office charts for the last weekend of March with a $23.7 million opening. It's a decent opening considering it was made for $35 million and I don't think Sony/Columbia will be worried at this stage about it's return. For director Robert Luketic, it's his third opening at around this range afterLegally Blondeand Monster-In-Law, showing his ability to consistently find an audience with simple plots and his success has come here because it looked to carry some of the same fun attitude as Ocean's Thirteen and Catch Me If You Can. FINALLY, American audiences played it smart this weekend and didn't waste their money on Superhero Movie. The latest in the long line of spoof movies is actually the first to be a notable flop taking in $9.5 million, only half of what Meet the Spartans earned and the decision to parody mostly just the original Spider-Man movie (which is six years old now) might have been to it's determent. Although it probably did result in a more coherent picture (which makes a change for this genre, though I haven't seen this film) it was never going to get the mass appeal of Spartans because it didn't parody 300, POTC and the like. A new year brings the same audience trepidation when it comes to movies about the Iraq war. Stop-Loss mega flopped to a $4.5 million opening and personally, it looked just like another lecture movie like the ads for Lions for Lambs. It's not particularly something I want to put my money down to see let's put it that way and Paramount will have a hard time making a return on it's $25 million budget. Elsewhere Simon Pegg proved once again he has absolutely no draw in the U.S. what-so-ever as the awful Run, Fatboy, Run failed to even hit the top ten and opened with $2.5 million. And staying strong is Horton Hears A Who, the first film to pass the $100 million mark in 2008 and the highest grossing film of the year so far. Most people who have seen it would say it's deserved too... 1 21 (2008) $23.7M $23.7M 2 Horton Hears a Who! (2008) $17.4M $117M 3 Superhero Movie (2008) $9.51M $9.51M 4 Meet the Browns (2008) $7.76M $32.8M 5 Drillbit Taylor (2008) $5.8M $20.6M 6 Shutter (2008) $5.33M $19.1M 7 10,000 B.C. (2008) $4.88M $84.9M 8 Stop-Loss (2008) $4.53M $4.53M 9 College Road Trip (2008) $3.5M $38.4M 10 The Bank Job (2008) $2.8M $24.1M source - box office mojo