This Weekend’s Winners: Marvel’s Thor produced more sturm than drang ($66 million) for Paramount. Meanwhile, it proved a nice day for a white wedding — and an even nicer one for a black one: Something Borrowed ($13.2 million) was brushed aside by Sony’s Jumping the Broom ($13.7 million).
This Weekend’s Losers: Audiences didn’t give a dam about The Beaver: Summit’s Mel Gibson drama managed to gnaw off just $104,000 from 22 theaters. Of course, that’s practically a home run compared with Mickey Rourke and Megan Fox’s indie gangster drama Passion Play, which grossed $2,000 — in its entire opening weekend.
How It All Went Down: Though its comic-book roots date back to the mid-sixties, Thor is one of Marvel’s lesser-known superheroes, and so proved heavily reliant on its inherent fan base, older men: Paramount audience research found nearly two out of three (63 percent) were dudes, and nearly three out of four of them (72 percent) were a little too old to be calling themselves “dude,†being 25 or older.
And even as Fast Five downshifted (grossing roughly half what Thor made, while losing nearly two thirds of its opening weekend audience), it still become the highest-grossing film of the year thus far.
Breathing Five’s exhaust were a pair of matrimonial-themed romantic comedies: Warner Bros.’ Something Borrowed and Sony’s Jumping the Broom. Both proved that the older women love them some wedding comedy, with Borrowed nearly three quarters female, and two thirds over the age of 25, while Sony found two thirds of its Jumping crowd (70 percent) was female and, similarly, nearly the same amount (64 percent) over 35.
Meanwhile, even The Beaver director Jodie Foster damned the marketing with faint praise, lamenting in one recent interview that “they try to say that it’s not going to hurt you in anyway. They made it as unthreatening as possible†— but when your star has to skip the premiere because he was being fingerprinted for battery, you have to wonder: What choice did the studio really have?