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Moneyball Comes in Second to Dolphin Tale This Weekend

As many predicted yesterday, Moneyball’s thin box office lead Friday did not pan out. Dolphin Tale pushed ahead to take the weekend’s top spot with a respectable $14.3 million take, compared to the baseball flick’s $12.2 million. (Thankfully for Moneyball, box office gold doesn’t always translate into Oscar gold.) The much-talked-about opener this week, Will Reiser’s cancer comedy 50/50 — starring Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — came in a sad fourth. (Lion King 3-D, which is wrapping up its short release, took third.) Deadline’s Nikke Finke blames the meager $9 million opening weekend on a too-wide release, explaining the days of platform releases are over, what with “the skyrocketing costs of marketing.†Further down the list were two more newbies: Sony’s Courageous, about cop fathers, and Jim Robinson’s poorly promoted horror feature Dream House. As for Taylor Lautner’s Abduction, its ticket sales were down 47 percent from last weekend — not exactly the breakout that the typecast actor was looking for. [Deadline]

Moneyball Comes in Second to Dolphin Tale This Weekend