The Butler, a civil rights drama movie starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey and directed by Lee Daniels, managed to surpass everybody’s expectations. It won the weekend box office battle debuting with $25 million in US and Canadian ticket sales through Sunday.
We’re The Millers, a comedy featuring Jennifer Aniston, finished in the number two slot, earning $17.8 million in its second weekend, according to studio estimates. Matt Damon’s sci-fi thriller, Elysium, which was the box office leader last weekend, fell to third place with $13.6 million.
Kick-Ass 2, a comedy sequel about a pair of teenage crime-fighting superheroes, languished in fourth place with $13.6 million in its first three days.
Ahead of the weekend, box office forecasters had predicted a close race between The Butler and Kick-Ass, with projections for each running as high as $20 million and above.
But audiences gravitated to The Butler, a critically praised drama, featuring talk show host Winfrey in her first acting role in 15 years. The film is inspired from the life of Eugene Allen, an African-American who served as a White House butler to eight US presidents. Whitaker plays the butler opposite Winfrey as his chain-smoking, hard-drinking wife, Gloria.
Entertainment mogul Winfrey promoted the film to her large fan base through media interviews and on her cable network, OWN. According to a poll on the Fandango movie website, 72 percent of The Butler ticket buyers said Winfrey’s role increased their interest in the film.
Both Winfrey and Whitaker won applause from critics, with 73 percent recommending the moviein reviews collected on Rotten Tomatoes.
“We expected it to do well. We did not expect it to do this well,” said Erik Lomis, distribution president for the Weinstein Co, the privately held company that distributed the movie.
Lomis said that Weinstein decided to release the film in August to capitalize on a lack of adult dramas in theaters. “That audience is underserved at this time of year,” he noted.
The film had a modest budget of around $25 million, financed by 28 investors, and Lomis said he expected the audience, which was 60 percent female and more than three-quarters of it over the age of 35, “will broaden out. Word of mouth is really strong”.
Rounding out the top of the charts, Walt Disney Co animated movie, Planes, earned the fifth position with $13.1 million in its second weekend.
Jobs, a new drama starring Ashton Kutcher as legendary Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs, pulled in $6.7 million for seventh place. The film, which chronicles 30 years of the late tech and computer entrepreneur’s life, was produced for $8.5 million, according to the Box Office Mojo website.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 20th, 2013.
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