US Weekend Box Office - Four Brothers is Number One

It’s the middle of summer! The days are long, children run around in the streets scaring pensioners all day and everyone crams into cinemas to watch the latest inane crosseyed blockbuster remake of an old movie.

Except, well, that’s just not the case. Except for the part about the kids - after all, what’s summer without pre-teen bottlefights? - but as for the movies, less and less people are going to the cinema.This time last year, box office takings were 10% better than they are now. And that means that weird, left-field, un-summery movies can do well. And that’s why Four Brothers is top of the US weekend box office chart.

Hollywood is convinced that illegal DVDs and internet pirates are causing the slow-down; witness the terrifying commercials
cinemas now show before feature films - basically saying you’ll go to
hell if you download Ocean’s Twelve, and that by watching movies on a
laptop you’re missing out on the "cinema experience" (as far as we can tell, that’s the experience of paying six
thousand pounds to sit in a sticky chair drinking eight litres of
watered down fizzy crap watching rubbish in a roomful of idiots).

But maybe films this year just aren’t as good as in 2004. Last year,
the August 13th-15th chart included Collateral, The Bourne Supremacy,
The Village, I, Robot and Spiderman 2. Whatever you think of those
movies, you can’t argue that they weren’t successful. This year, the list includes… well,
let’s look at the US weekend box office chart.

1. Four Brothers (Marky Mark and one of Outkast star in an actually pretty OK-sounding modern-day western revenge flick) $20,700,000

2. The Skeleton Key (Wooo! Keys are spooooooky! Watch out Goldie Hawn’s daughter! Watch out for the spooky keys!) $15,795,000

3. The Dukes Of Hazzard (Jessica Simpson proves that she’s mainly tits and hair on legs) $13,030,000

4. Wedding Crashers ("Vince Vaughn" is now acceptable rhyming slang for the word "forlorn") $12,025,000

5. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo (Possibly the least-anticipated sequel of all time) $9,400,000

6. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (People laugh at a fat German for two hours) $7,260,000

7. March Of The Penguins (Coming soon: April Of The Penguins) $6,730,000

8. Sky High (Like The Incredibles, but with added John Travolta’s wife) $6,114,000

9. Must Love Dogs (A charming rom-com about domestic bestiality) $4,585,000

10. The Great Raid (Possibly about what a good product fly spray is. We don’t know) $3,374,000

[story by Stuart Heritage]