Gnomeo & Juliet, as sweet as these G-rated animated gnomes might be, will probably never waddle to an Academy Award ceremony. So, while the big boys were over at the Kodak Theatre last night tossing each other golden statuettes, these lawn ornaments were hauling in their own honors: Namely, a first-place finish at the box office.
Gnomeo & Juliet earned $14.2 million last weekend—underwhelming, but more than enough to rip up Owen Wilson’s R-rated Hall Pass ($13.4 million) and push last week’s champ into the not-so-great Unknown (or, at least, into third place with $12.4 million).
The week’s other big release, Drive Angry, crashed into ninth place with a meager $5.1 million, proving that your driving instructor was right all along. The faith-based The Grace Card finished 16th in its debut weekend: It made $1.1 million, but it only screened in 352 theaters, compared to Drive Angry’s 2,300, meaning the Christian flick actually had a far better per-screen average.
But really, most entertainment eyes weren’t on Gnomeo or Hall Pass or any other 2011 release. They were focused firmly on 2010—and the year’s “best” films honored at the Academy Awards ceremony.
The King’s Speech took home the biggest prize, winning the statuette for Best Picture (and supplementing it with three others, for Best Actor Colin Firth, Best Director Tom Hooper and Best Original Screenplay). But Oscar spread his wealth around: Christopher Nolan’s freaky Inception also scored four wins and The Social Network snagged three. And, in a particularly populist nod, the year’s two biggest money-earners, Toy Story 3 and Alice in Wonderland, each took home two Academy Awards.
Indeed, when you looked at the winners, most of ’em were movies that people actually paid to see. “By coincidence or design, Sunday night’s awards played to the moviegoing majority,” wrote Time’s Richard Corliss. “Every feature film given an Oscar, except for the foreign-language and documentary winners, had earned more than $100 million at the worldwide box office.”
And even when you pare the take down to what these films have earned in North America, this year’s “best” were surprisingly popular. The King’s Speech has earned nearly $114 million domestically so far, and it’s still ranked in this week’s box office Top Ten. Seven of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture were among the 100 highest-grossing films of the year. The three that weren’t—The Kids are All Right, 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone—were skunked last night. It all suggests that either the movie-going public is getting discerningly artsier, the Hollywood intelligentsia is growing more populist. Or perhaps it’s a bit of both. And, as we’ve noted here, it seems as if many of these films—as harsh and hard as they can be at times—also seem more hopeful than a couple years back, when bleak movies like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were battling for Oscar glory.
And we’re not done counting the receipts, either. Most of these films (the ones still in theaters, anyway) will get a significant post-Oscar bump. The King’s Speech might wind up becoming a bonafide hit—particularly given the fact that its makers will be expunging a bevy of F-words and re-releasing it as a PG-13 film. (The R-rated version will, by the way, be pulled from theaters completely.)
Gathering from the posts I’ve seen y’all make here before, I know quite a few of you are King’s Speech fans. Are you pleased the film will be getting a PG-13 makeover? And what did you think of the Oscars?
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