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Women at the Box Office: August 13-15

posted by Women & Hollywood
Monday, August 16, 2010 at 11:14am CDT

The dynamic of the weekend was set up as adversarial all week.

Will the girls beat the boys? Will the boys punch the girls? No wonder we are still so fucked up about gender at the movies. If we didn’t set the movies up as an us vs. them dynamic maybe men would see more movies about women.

So the news is that The Expendables starring the 1980s scored $35 million and Eat Pray Love (EPL) grossed $23.7. The budget for The Expendables seems to be between $70 and 80 million and the budget for EPL is about $60 million.

EPL clearly drew a majority of its audience from women – 72% of audience for EPL was female; 56% were over 35 which means that a lot of younger women saw it too. IndieWIRE says that “64% of the under-35s were between age 17 and 29.”

While some would think that $23.7 million for a Julia Roberts flick seems low, don’t be fooled. The films that starred Julia and not a cacophony of other folks had pretty similar numbers (some lower, some higher.)

Here are the numbers:

Mona Lisa Smile- $11 million

America’s Sweetheart- $30 million

Erin Brokovich – $28 million

Runaway Bride- $35 million

Notting Hill – $21 million

and Pretty Woman (which of course was more Richard Gere’s flick) – $11 million. That film went on to make $178 million.

I’m thinking that EPL will play through the end of the summer and will do fine at the box office.

Other notes from the weekend:

The Kids Are All Right directed and co-written by Lisa Cholodenko has grossed $16,731,058 making it the top specialty grossing film of the year.

Cairo Time written and directed by Ruba Nadda grossed $80,903, on 17 screens and will expand to the top ten markets next weekend.

Winter’s Bone directed at co-written by Debra Granik has now played for 10 weeks for a total of $4,859,165.