The people who made Eagle Eye the weekend’s #1 film with a $29.2 million haul are obviously easy lays. The ads and reviews made it crystal clear this was/is a brainless, pumped-up slapdash thriller, and they went anyway.
The $13 million-plus that Nights at Rodanthe earned for the #2 position came from the wallets of women with low (certainly flexible) standards who don’t want to know from reviews and just wanted to hang with Richard Gere and Diane Lane…end of diagnosis.
The $6.5 million earned by Fireproof in 839 locations, or $7,764 per theatre, makes for a nice fourth-place showing by Sherwood Pictures, the Georgia-based Christian outfit (although it’s more likely than not that most of the people who paid to see it this weekend are McCain supporters).
And the box-office death of Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna — $3.5 million at 1,150 locations — was written on the wall a long while ago. Sentimental-cornball, bad reviews, limited interest in black World War II soldiers in Tuscany subject, the shooting incident in the trailer, 166 minutes….forget it.