Dreamworks Animation’s Puss in Boots won the domestic box office this weekend with an estimated $34 million, but Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin topped the worldwide market thanks to a $55.8 million haul from 19 European countries.  Since there had been no major “family” movie release in 5 weeks, analysts thought that Puss in Boots would open stronger, but the 3-D toon earned a weak 51% of its revenues from extra-dimensional showings, and bowed well below projections.  Puss added $17 million from three overseas markets, but it wasn’t quite enough to overtake Tintin.  Freak winter storms in the East and Halloween celebrations on Saturday night helped depress box office numbers, which, reversing the trend of the past few weeks, were still up about 8% from the same frame last year.

 

Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): October 28 - 30, 2011
	Film	Weekend Gross	Screens	Avg./ Screen	Total Gross	Wk#
1	Puss in Boots	$34,000,000	3,952	$8,603	$34,000,000	1
2	Paranormal Activity 3	$18,530,000	3,329	$5,566	$81,305,000	2
3	In Time	$12,000,000	3,122	$3,844	$12,000,000	1
4	Footloose	$5,400,000	3,224	$1,675	$38,443,000	3
5	The Rum Diary	$5,010,631	2,272	$2,205	$5,010,631	1
6	Real Steel	$4,700,000	2,914	$1,613	$73,900,000	4
7	The Three Musketeers	$3,500,000	3,017	$1,160	$14,839,878	2
8	The Ides of March	$2,700,000	1,572	$1,718	$33,496,000	4
9	Moneyball	$2,400,000	1,631	$1,472	$67,421,000	6
10	Courageous	$1,800,000	1,134	$1,587	$27,644,000	5

Puss in Boots scored a very solid “A-“ CinemaScore with opening weekend audiences that skewed female (59%) and surprisingly older (55% over 25%) than one might expect, though kids under 12 made up 32% of the crowd, with parents accounting for 36%.  Thanks to the star power of Antonio Banderas, the movie did very well with Latinos, who made up 35% of the audience.  While it opened below expectations and with a substantiallly lower total than similar Dreamworks releases, the weather and other factors make it impossible to render a definitive judgement on Puss in Boots' prospects at this point.

 

Last week’s winner Paranormal Activity 3 dropped 65%, but still managed to hold on to second place.  The sci-fi thriller In Time starring Justin Timberlake debuted modestly in third place with an estimated $12 million, while the Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, which starred Johnny Depp, managed a “hipsters-only” total of $5 million, which was just good enough for fifth place. I n Time will have trouble earning back its $35 million cost, especially in view of its poor “B-“ CinemaScore, though it should be said that the younger male demographic gave the “PG-13” film an “A-“ grade.

 

Johnny Depp did quite a bit of promotion for The Rum Diary, which was produced by his Infinitum Nihil back in 2009 but Hunter S. Thompson is a tough sell in the suburbs.  The best chance for this movie would appear to be as a “cult film” on DVD. 

 

The only other new film was Roland Emmerich’s period fantasy Anonymous, which opened in just 265 theaters and earned a million dollars.  The “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” saga played to an older crowd (65% over 30) that evidently never heard of Occam’s Razor (they gave the film an “A-“ CinemaScore).