Johnny Knoxville made up as the none-too-convincing octogenarian Irving Zisman easily topped the weekend box office as Bad Grandpa expanded the Jackass movie franchise with a stronger-than-expected $32 million opening.  Together with strong performances from holdovers Gravity and Captain Phillips, Bad Grandpa powered the box office to an 8.6% gain over the same weekend last year when Argo topped the box office (for the only time) during its third weekend of release when it made just $12 million.
 
Bad Grandpa takes the Jackass series of stunt comedies to a slightly different genre as Knoxville is the only Jackass regular to appear in what is basically a sort of redneck Borat with Knoxville taking his Sisman character, who appeared in short bits in all the previous Jackass movies, on a cross-country odyssey with a mixture of staged scenes and hidden camera humor.  While Bad Grandpa didn’t match the 3-D aided debut of Jackass 3-D, which earned $50.4 million during its October debut in 2010, it beat the opening totals of all the other Jackass films. 
 
In comparison with Jackass 3-D, which had an opening weekend audience that was 61% male and 69% under 25, Bad Grandpa attracted an audience that was just 56% male and only 37% under 25.  The movie’s mediocre "B" CinemaScore shouldn’t hurt the film’s longevity too much since the Jackass series is pretty front-loaded anyway, and there isn’t another raunchy We’re the Millers type of potential on the horizon for a while.  The films in the Jackass series of gross-out comedies are as unlikely to inspire lofty CinemaScores as they are to lose money.  Expect Bad Grandpa to return to Earth next weekend, but it definitely owned this frame.

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): October 25-27, 2013
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa	$32,000,000	3,336	$9,592	$32,000,000	1
2	Gravity	$20,300,000	3,707	$5,476	$199,814,000	4
3	Captain Phillips	$11,800,000	3,143	$3,754	$70,074,000	3
4	The Counselor	$8,000,000	3,044	$2,628	$8,000,000	1
5	Cloudy w/ a Chance of Meatballs 2	$6,100,000	3,111	$1,961	$100,611,000	5
6	Carrie	$5,900,000	3,157	$1,869	$26,021,000	2
7	Escape Plan	$4,340,000	2,883	$1,505	$17,424,000	2
8	12 Years a Slave	$2,150,000	123	$17,480	$3,410,000	2
9	Enough Said	$1,555,000	835	$1,862	$13,021,000	6
10	Prisoners	$1,063,000	1,347	$789	$59,122,000	6

Meanwhile Oscar contenders Gravity and Captain Phillips, both of which have benefited from high Cinemascores, continue their strong box office performances, dropping just 32.4% and 28.1% respectively.  Gravity, which added an estimated $20.3 million to its domestic total, has now crossed the $200 million mark, and appears to be far from done.
 
That is not true of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, which marks the screenwriting debut of novelist Cormac McCarthy (The Road, No Country for Old Men), and features a star-studded cast that includes Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Cameron Diaz.  The talky, sporadically violent thriller has earned just a 35% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics comparing it unfavorably to another drug-deal gone wrong film, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, a much more stylish cinematic "downer."  Forget about word-of-mouth helping The Counselor, opening weekend crowds, which appeared to be eligible for Medicare with 85% over 25, gave the movie a wretched “D” CinemaScore.
 
Horror films have generally done well in 2013, but the remake of Stephen King’s Carrie, which debuted at #3 last week, slipped 63.4% and fell to 6th as it earned an estimated $5.9 million. 
 
Mention should be made of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a film based on the 1850s biography of a free black man living in the North, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.  Expanding from 19 to 123 theaters, this Oscar contender moved into the Top Ten at number 8 thanks to the best per-theater average of the week ($17,480) with the exception of the Palme D’Or winner from Cannes, the French film Blue Is the Warmest Color, which opened in just four theaters in New York and L.A. and earned $25K per venue.
 
Check back here next week to see if the science fiction film Ender’s Game, which is based on a novel by the controversial Orson Scott Card, or the bucket list drama Last Vegas, or the animated feature Free Birds can take the box office crown.