The remake of The Karate Kid featuring Will Smith’s son Jaden surpassed expectations and easily won the weekend box office with an estimated $56 million.  The expected close battle with another 80s retread, The A-Team never came off as Fox’s reworking of the quintessential TV buddy action show underperformed with an estimated $26 million.  But overall the box office was up a solid 10% from the same weekend last year, reversing a downward trend that had set in after the summer got off to a promising start with Iron Man 2 (see “Is Hollywood’s Party Ogre”).  Next weekend Toy Story 3 and Jonah Hex will attempt to keep the box office energized.

The Karate Kid, which was produced for just $40 million, averaged a stellar $15,288 per theater.  Its prospects for a continued run are also good since it managed to earn a CinemaScore of “A” from its opening weekend audiences, which were 53% female and 56% under 25.  Family members attending together accounted for 45% of the Kid's opening weekend crowd.

The A-Team, which cost a reported $110 million to produce, averaged a rather ordinary $7355 per venue.  A 4% dip from Friday to Saturday night could spell trouble, but it’s too early to write off this popular property just yet, especially since the movie scored a solid "B+" CinemaScore from audiences.  Fox is hoping that the A-Team will be able to broaden its demographic appeal to include more females and younger viewers.  Opening weekend audiences were 59% male with 61% over 25.

Shrek Forever After, which led the box office for 3 weeks, had another strong outing and finished in third place while bringing its cumulative to $210 million.  Next week when Toy Story 3 opens, it will be possible to see if the fourth Shrek film, which has so far demonstrated excellent “legs,” will be able to get close to the performance of its two predecessors.

Comedies tend to have stronger "legs" than other genres, and the Judd Apatow-produced, R-rated laffer Get Him to The Greek fell only 42.5% in its second week, while Lionsgate’s comedy Killers declined just 48% in its second frame. 

The adventure film Prince of Persia dropped 53% in its third weekend and finished in sixth place.  The video game-based Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film, which has several graphic novel tie-ins, has earned $72 million so far and has an outside chance at making $100 million domestically, not a bad showing for an ordinary film, but not so great for a movie that cost a reported $200 million.

In its sixth weekend in theaters Iron Man 2 finished in ninth place and came very close ($299,311,000) to crossing the $300 million mark. 

Warner Bros.’ innovative horror film Splice slipped 61.3% demonstrating once again that the high summer season doesn’t appear to be conducive to successful runs for horror films no matter how much the critics applaud them.