Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino muscled its way to the top of the weekend box office with an estimated take of $29 million.  Warner Bros. had kept Gran Torino in limited release for four weeks before opening it wide during the first heavily contested weekend of 2009 and it easily sideswiped the competition and took the top spot with a potent average of $10,337 per theater.  Gran Torino garnered Eastwood’s top opening ever, and with a CinemaScore of “A” from audiences, it could be well on its way to becoming the iconic 78-year-old star’s top grossing film.

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): January 9-11, 2009

In Gran Torino's wake two new films, Bride Wars and The Unborn, earned nearly identical grosses estimated at $21 million.  As expected Bride Wars, a politically incorrect comedy which Fox deliberately debuted during the NFL playoffs, was a hit with females (80% of its audience) of all ages with the crowd nearly evenly split between those over and under 25.  Bride Wars received an “A-“ CinemaScore from audiences, while The Unborn got only a “B-, which indicates a potentially major drop next weekend for the horror film.  Still The Unborn blew away analyst’s expectations.  As the first horror film release of 2009, The Unborn demonstrated that audiences were indeed hungering for scary fare.  Led by these three powerful debuts the cumulative weekend box office was 14% above the same weekend last year.

Frank Miller’s adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit has gone south with a vengeance, falling 82.8% during its third weekend of release and ending up at #23 with a pitiful average of just $515 per venue.  It now appears that The Spirit won’t make more than $21 million at the domestic box office and the possibility of a major revival on DVD also appears remote.