Box Office Report: 'Hansel & Gretel' Ekes Out a Win; 'Parker' and 'Movie 43' Stumble

'Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters'

WINNERS OF THE WEEK: Good titles. Whatever you may think of the film itself, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is a terrific title. It tells you everything you need to know about the movie, including whether or not it's your kind of movie. If it is, you probably were among those who helped it debut at Number One this weekend with an estimated $19.0 million. Indeed, the title may have been the biggest selling point of the movie; not its horror/action premise, not its stars (despite The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner is not a proven box office draw, and neither is erstwhile Bond girl Gemma Arterton), and not the 3D retrofitting that helped keep the movie on the shelf for a year. The film opened in line with pundits' modest expectations; imagine how much more poorly it would have done without such a vivid and apt title.

Last week's champ, evocatively titled horror movie Mama, dropped to second place with an estimated $12.9 million, down 55 percent from its premiere a week ago, which is not unusual for a horror movie. Silver Linings Playbook is not an evocative title, but at least it's a unique and memorable one; the Oscar-hopeful dramedy came in third and earned a strong $10.0 million according to estimates, down just a hair (seven percent) from last week. Fellow Oscar contender Zero Dark Thirty (fantastic title for a spy thriller) was close behind with an estimated $9.8 million, down 38 percent from last week. Both films have earned about $69 million to date; if they cross $100 million, that will be seven out of nine Best Picture nominees that are nine-figure hits, making this year's crop the most popular slate of Academy Award nominees in memory.

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LOSERS OF THE WEEK: Bad Titles. Can you tell from the title what Parker is about? Is it about Sarah Jessica? About the guy who stows your car while you dine at a fancy restaurant? No, it's about the hero of several Donald E. Westlake novels, as played by Jason Statham. Despite a pedigreed director (Taylor Hackford, of Ray and An Officer and a Gentleman fame) and a high-powered supporting cast (Jennifer Lopez, Nick Nolte), Parker mustered only a fifth-place opening with just an estimated $7.0 million.

At least it outperformed Movie 43. Again, a confusing title (Was there any clue that the film is a collection of raunchy comic sketches? Did moviegoers fear they wouldn't be able to follow the plot if they hadn't seen Movies 1 through 42?) didn't help. Despite an all-star cast, the film, which had been expected to open around $9 million, came in seventh with an estimated  $5.0 million. Guess this means there won't be a Movie 44.

HEAD OF STATHAM: Jason Statham occupies a curious niche in Hollywood. He's a dependable lead in action movies; in fact, he's a one-man genre. You always know what you're getting with a Statham movie, including a battle-scarred action hero who can out-think, out-mutter, and out-headbutt a parade of bad guys. And yet it's not at all clear that he's a star. The actor works steadily (he's made about 18 movies over the last decade), but primarily in independent films (his last studio feature was Death Race five years ago). His movies routinely open below $10 million and top out around $25 or $30 million in North America. Even a movie like Parker, with a literary source, an arty director, and a top-notch supporting cast, isn't doing any better than the standard Statham film.

So how does he keep getting lead roles? Well, his movies are inexpensive to make – cheap enough for indie distributors, at least. And they do very well overseas (where his laconic style translates easily), typically earning half or more of their total gross outside North America. And there's something to be said for a guy who reliably delivers exactly what he's called upon to deliver, with no muss, no fuss. Careers have been built on less.

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Box Office Report: 'Breaking Dawn Part 2' Falls Shy of 'Twilight' Record

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WINNER OF THE WEEK: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Okay, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln didn't exactly take an ax to the massive grosses of Twiilght: Breaking Dawn Part 2, but it still took a bigger-than-expected bite out of the weekend box office. After last weekend's impressive limited-release debut, the biopic expanded wide and raked in an estimated $21.0 million, good for third place. Not too shabby, considering that the Daniel Day-Lewis movie had pundits predicting a gross as low as $11 million. But his much-buzzed-about performance drew grown-up audiences who might otherwise have poked their heads into Breaking Dawn Part 2 or Skyfall.

 Skyfall, by the way, did lose 53 percent of last week's business, but falling to an estimated $41.5 million in its second weekend was still good enough for second place. The latest James Bond film has grossed $161.3 million in 10 days. Wreck-It Ralph continued to have the kiddie audience to itself, coming in fourth with an estimated $18.3 million, for a three weekend-total of $121.5 million. In fifth place, Flight lost altitude, dropping 42 percent from last week to an estimated $8.6 million, for a total to date of $61.3 million that will stall well shy of $100 million by the end of its run.

LOSERS OF THE WEEK: Team Edward and Team Jacob. Granted, it's hard to call a movie a loser that opened with an estimated $141.3 million. Still the fifth and final Twilight had been expected to be the biggest, when actually, it sucked up just a bit less in ticket sales than the second installment, New Moon (which opened with $142.8 million in 2009). Experts had expected it to bite off at least $150 million, so the actual take is a mild disappointment. Still, word-of-mouth is strong, and the movie does have some adult appeal, so it's not entirely dependent on the teen girl audience that made up the bulk of the opening-weekend crowd.  So despite an opening that didn't soar over the fence, there's no reason to think Breaking Dawn Part 2 won't end up in the same ballpark as the rest of the vampire franchise.

WATCH YOUR BACK, BELLA: Like The Twilight Saga's Kristen Stewart, who'll be astonishing audiences next month by playing a very un-Bella-like sexual libertine in On the Road, rising starlets Jennifer Lawrence and Keira Knightley seem to feel just as comfortable stretching in indie and art-house films as they do working in mainstream blockbusters. This weekend, both unveiled Oscar-baiting performances in The Silver Linings Playbook and Anna Karenina, respectively. Lawrence may be as big a draw in Playbook as co-stars Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, and not because anyone expects her to remind them of The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen. Frequent Pirates of the Caribbean heroine Knightley always manages to breathe passionate, fiery life into highbrow literature when she works with director Joe Wright, who also directed her in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Both Playbook and Anna Karenina showed signs of living up to their art-house hype with this weekend's strong openings on just 16 screens each. Playbook earned an estimated $458,000, or about $29,000 per screen, while Anna Karenina scored an estimated $315,000, or about  $20,000 per screen. (Those numbers are nearly two or three times what the impressive Lincoln made per screen this weekend.) Such figures suggest that both Lawrence and Knightley will do very well when their movies open wide – and that the two actresses will continue to be able to balance their careers between art and commerce.

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'Breaking Bad' Star Bryan Cranston to Direct Episode of 'The Office'

Bryan Cranston as Walter White in 'Breaking Bad.'

When he's not cooking meth as Walter White on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston likes directing sitcoms: the menacing star of AMC's hit show steps behind the camera to direct an epsiode of The Office this season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Cranston will direct an episode called "Work Bus" that's scheduled to air October 18th. He's previously taken the reins on installments of Modern Family and Malcolm in the Middle (on which he played the father), as well as Breaking Bad.

Office co-star Rainn Wilson let word slip on Twitter yesterday when he posted a photo of himself posing with Cranston and wrote, "Free meth for 'The Office!' (look who's directing)." Cranston has won three Emmys for his work on Breaking Bad and is currently nominated for Best Actor in a Drama.

The Office returns September 20th on NBC.

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'The Office' to End After Ninth Season

The upcoming ninth season of The Office will be its last, original showrunner Greg Daniels told reporters on a conference call, Entertainment Weekly reports. "This year feels like the last chance to . . . make an artistic ending for the show," said Daniels, who returns to the NBC sitcom after departing the show following its fifth season. 

The Office hit record low ratings last year following the exit of Steve Carell, who played Michael Scott, the lovably bumbling boss of Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch.

Daniels promised big things for the show's swan song, which premieres September 20th: "We're planning a big exciting last season . . . all questions will be answered this year. We're going to see who's behind the documentary."

In other Office-related news, it was revealed that Breaking Bad star Brian Cranston will take the director's chair for an episode this season titled "Work Bus," which is set to air October 18th.

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Box Office Report: 'Expendables 2' Not So Expendable; 'Sparkle' Not So Sparkly

Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Dolph Lundgren attend a photocall for The Expendables 2 in London on August 13th, 2012.

WINNER OF THE WEEK: Old age. The Expendables 2, now with even more AARP-eligible action stars than the first installment, beat a slew of young whippersnappers to grab the box office crown with a weekend take of $28.8 million, according to studio estimates.  That's less than the $34.8 million debut of the original two Augusts ago but still pretty spry for the dog days of summer. Last week's champ, The Bourne Legacy, also proved to have strong legs for an action franchise on its fourth go-round. Jeremy Renner, finally an action hero at 41, saw his spy tale gross an estimated $17.0 million, good for second place, with a loss in business of 55 percent from last week. That's typical for the genre, though the movie that held up the best, week-to-week, was Hope Springs, with just a 38 percent drop its second week. The romantic dramedy, whose youngest star is 50-year-old Steve Carell, pulled in an estimated $9.1 million to finish at Number Eight.

LOSER OF THE WEEK: Youth. 3D animated kiddie horror comedy ParaNorman had to settle for a third place premiere with an estimated $14.0 million. You'd think a movie like that would do better in October, but it picked a week with intense competition for the family audience. Sparkle, sold on the basis of movie newbie and American Idol fave Jordin Sparks' youth appeal (since Whitney Houston wasn't around to sell it to her peers), had been expected to do as well as $18 million, but it opened in fifth place with an estimated $12.0 million. Disney's fable The Odd Life of Timothy Green debuted all the way down at Number Seven with an estimated $10.9 million. Given that Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and even Brave are still attracting kids, it seemed the wrong week to introduce a new movie in the family marketplace, let alone three of them.

CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC: Sure, it sucks to be humiliated in front of the whole world by your girlfriend's affair with a married man, but Robert Pattinson couldn't have picked a better time to have Kristen Stewart cheat on him. His week-long ice-cream-and-sympathy tour of the nation's media outlets yielded a publicity windfall for Cosmopolis, an art-house movie about a tycoon in a limo riding a few blocks across Manhattan to get a haircut, a film based on a highbrow Don DeLillo novel and adapted by a director (David Cronenberg) with a notoriously chilly outlook – in other words, a picture that ought to scare off most of Pattinson's teen Twi-hard fanbase. Instead, the movie opened with a per-screen average estimated at $24,100, far and away the best among films currently in theaters. (Expendables 2, for instance, opened with an $8,700 per-screen average.) Granted, Cosmopolis premiered on just three screens, but an average that big suggests a strong want-to-see factor as Cosmopolis gradually opens across North America in the weeks to come. So Pattinson's public moping seems to have paid off.

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'The Hunger Games' Breaks Box Office Records for Opening Weekend

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen and Liam Hemsworth as Gale Hawthorne in 'The Hunger Games.'

The Hunger Games was a massive hit at the box office on its opening weekend, grossing an estimated $155 million domestically, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Lionsgate-produced film, based on first novel in the Y.A. trilogy by Suzanne Collins, settled easily into the top box office slot for the weekend, and set a few records along the way. Earning the third-highest opening weekend gross ever, beat only by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and The Dark Knight, The Hunger Games wins first place for the highest opening of non-sequel movie in history. It is also the biggest opening weekend for a non-summer release.

As Rolling Stone reported earlier this week, the film was hitting high marks even before it opened, selling out more than 2,000 showtimes before Friday's premiere to reach the highest advance ticket sales of any non-sequel movie. 

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