Brought to you by comedy guru, writer/director Judd Apatow and starring Adam Sandler, Funny People should have brought in a lot of coin this weekend. Check out Adam Sandler’s box office chart here. The only problem was the way the film was marketed. Funny People is a drama that has been masquerading as balls to the wall comedy and once audiences caught wind of this, many chose not to check out Sandler’s latest. It’s their loss believe me, as the film is quite good. You can read my review here. Anyway, let’s get to the numbers. Funny People opened to a still respectable $22.7M but that was fairly lower than most industry expectations who had the movie pulling in $30M+. Yours truly was way off the mark with my forecast of $28M, but I have to be wrong sometimes! It’s the natural order of things and it keeps me from getting too cocky. That being said, Funny People can go one of 2 ways from here. It can become a word of mouth hit and march its way to the $100M mark or it can fizzle out and find its way to about $55M. Reviews have been decidedly mixed and the films long running time (for a dramedy) isn’t doing it any favors. My guess is that Funny People will disappear rather quickly from theatres but it will find its audience on cable where it will finally be appreciated for the little gem that it is.

The latest kids movie, Aliens in the Attic, failed to capitalize on the summer audience and opened to a puny $8M, exactly as I predicted. Some day the studios who put this kind of garbage in theatres will realize that kids know a stinker when they see one and will only beg their parents to take them to movies that are actually good. This is one alien invasion at multiplexes that is going to be short lived. Look for Aliens to end up with about $20M by the end of its run.

The final new film of the weekend was horror thriller, The Collector. The movie is about a burglar who stumbles into the wrong house and from there the terror ensues. Reviews were awful (not odd for a horror movie) and fans of the genre chose to skip this one. As I thought, The Collector failed to make the top 10 and grossed a measly $3.6M, very close to my $3M guess. The film will be lucky to kill its way to $8M before it slips out of theatres but should go on to haunt insomniacs in the bowels of late night cable TV. 

Among holdovers, last weekend’s champ, G-Force slipped a reasonable 45% to grab another $17.5M, bringing its total to $66.9M after only 10 days. This was right in line with my forecast of a 44% drop. Look for the rodent spies to make it to about $95M by the end of their mission. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince stabilized after last weekend’s fall of 63% due to it finally getting on IMAX screens all over the country. Potter dropped 40%, just as I thought it would, to gross another $17.7M, bringing its total to a staggering $255.5M. Looks like Potter will be able to conjure up just enough magic to make it to the $300M mark. To see how the rest of my predictions fared, check out the chart below.

Be sure to come back Thursday to check out my predictions for the last big popcorn movie of the season, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and then on Friday to read my review. You can see a cool featurette about the making of Joe here. I will also be predicting the opening of Meryl Streep’s latest, Julie & Julia and yet another fright flick, A Perfect Getaway.

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