'Hardball' Tops Slow Box Office
Sept. 24 -- For the second weekend in a row, America's movie theaters posted their lowest totals of the year, with the Keanu Reeves Little League drama Hardball taking the top spot again while the only major new release — Mariah Carey's musical soaper Glitter — failed to even make the top 10 (it opened in 11th place with $2.5 million).
Total receipts for the weekend were $44.2 million, a 15 percent dropoff from last week's previous year-to-date low. It's possible that the celebrity disaster-relief telethon on Friday night, which drew 60 million viewers, had a negative impact on the box-office numbers.
With few new movies in the marketplace (Big Trouble with Tim Allen and Training Day with Denzel Washington were abruptly moved to later dates in the great release-date reshuffle that followed the events of Sept. 11), something rare happened — upward movement on the list.
The Others jumped from fifth place to second (and made about $700,000 more than it did last weekend, making it the only mover to round up more lucre this weekend than last) while Rush Hour 2 vaulted from sixth place to fourth and Mark Wahlberg's Rock Star jumped all the way from 10th to a tie for sixth with Two Can Play That Game.
The box office is likely to return to its typical volatile self next week with the arrival of three wide releases, the Michael Douglas thriller Don't Say A Word, the sentimental Stephen King adaptation Hearts in Atlantis and the Ben Stiller satire Zoolander.
Andrew Johnston is a film critic and associate editor at US WEEKLY magazine.
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