Weekend Box Office: 'Wolverine' Beheads McConaughey

It is of course impossible to say whether the much-discussed work print leak damaged Wolverine's box office take, nor whether Fox's cockamamie strategy of tacking on different mid-credits codas to different prints of the film helped matters. All we can conclude is that if piracy hurt, it didn't hurt that much (which really has been the refrain for the movie industry all along), since I don't think too many people will be unhappy with an $87 million first weekend. For those keeping score, that's well ahead of X-Men, marginally ahead of Bryan Singer's X2, and roughly $15 million behind Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand. Wolverine is not likely to hold up well, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where it doesn't get to $200 million domestic. And after all the angst, that's a victory.

One thing to consider is what this means for the straight action model of the comic book movie. I didn't dislike Wolverine like a lot of people did, but it undoubtedly did away with the nuance, intricacy and character focus that we've gotten used to seeing in major comic book adaptations. I bet it's much easier to make a Wolverine than a Iron Man or an X2 or a Watchmen, and it seems not to be much less financially rewarding.

I very much enjoyed not watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past this weekend, and it seems so did a bunch of other people. The Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy picked up $15.3 million, which isn't bad, but puts the film way behind the last three identical Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies. And the 3D-animated Battle for Terra, while not a Delgo-level bust, couldn't break the top 10 and ended up with just over $1 million on around 1,200 screens. It's tough out there for animated features not bankrolled and marketed by huge studios.

The weekend's top 10 after the jump.



1 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) - $87.00 ($21,225) - $87.00
2 - Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (WB) - $15.33 ($4,827) - $15.33
3 - Obsessed (Screen Gems) - $12.20 ($4,853) - $47.00
4 - 17 Again (New Line) - $6.36 ($1,952) - $48.50
5 - Monsters vs. Aliens (Dreamworks Animation) - $5.80 ($2,209) - $182.40
6 - The Soloist (Dreamworks) - $5.60 ($2,755) - $18.11
7 - Earth (DisneyNature) - $4.18 ($2,319) - $21.84
8 - Fighting (Rogue) - $4.17 ($1,805) - $17.51
9 - Hannah Montana: The Movie (Disney) - $4.08 ($1,446) - $70.86
10 - State of Play (Universal) - $3.66 ($1,495) - $30.88
11 - Fast & Furious (Universal) - $2.73 ($1,070) - $149.77
12 - Battle for Terra (Lionsgate) - $1.06 ($916) - $1.06

Next week we will get the answer to one of the summer's big questions, which is just how viable J.J. Abrams' Star Trek will turn out to be. I have seen the film, and while it is accessible to non-Trekkies, it will probably only be special to the already-initiated. The counterprogramming will be the Summit Entertainment comedy Next Day Air.