Exit popcorn-pic season, hello movies for grown-ups: Focus Features' George Clooney starrer "The American" topped the domestic box office with an estimated $16.4 million during the summer-ending Labor Day weekend.
The assassin-themed thriller rang up $19.5 million in its first six days, after unspooling midweek to get a jump on the four-day frame. Two other wide openers bore the same R rating as "American" but seemed more restricted in audience appeal.
Fox's crime actioner "Machete" topped daily rankings with $3.9 million in its first day of release on Friday, but the Robert Rodriguez-shepherded splatterfest quickly ceded its lead to the more broadly appealing Clooney pic and fetched $14 million in second place through Monday. Warners' romantic comedy "Going the Distance" -- starring Drew Barrymore and Justin Long -- proved the weakest of the weekend debutantes, wooing $8.6 million in fifth place during its first four days.
Elsewhere, Sony's heist actioner "Takers" took in $13.5 million in its sophomore session to finish third on the frame and pile cumulative coin to $40 million, while Lionsgate's horror pic "The Last Exorcism" conjured $8.8 million in fourth place for an 11-day cume of $33.6 million. Outside of the top rankings, Fox's special edition re-release of "Avatar" posted another $2.9 million in its second weekend to push record cume for the James Cameron epic to $758.2 million.
Labor Day is marked annually on the first Monday of September, both in the U.S. and Canada. Collectively, the top 10 pictures registered $93.2 million, or 3% less than top performers in last year's comparable holiday-stretched weekend, Rentrak said.
Domestic film distributors collected roughly $4.24 billion in summer box office since the season began on May 7, or almost 1% less than last year, while summer admissions were down almost 6% to an estimated 538 million. Hollywood marked a shorter box-office season this year, with 18 weekends compared to a year-earlier 19.
At first glance, the audience profiles of "American" and "Machete" weren't dramatically different, outside of an even older-skewing base for the former: "American" skewed 60% male with 88% of patrons aged 25 or older (and two-thirds of them over 35); "Machete" was 55% male, with 55% of its business coming from the 25 and up crowd. But Latino moviegoers represented a huge 60% of support for the Fox film, which would have struggled without an ethnic base notably similar to that for "Exorcism" a week earlier.
Helmed by onetime music-director Anton Corbijn, "American" co-stars Italian actress Violante Placido.
Older adult moviegoers made "American" their weekend "film of choice," said Jack Foley, distribution president at the Universal specialty-film unit.
"The strategic timing of the film's release at the holiday -- and beginning on Wednesday -- definitely generated more revenue for the film and now positions it well for a rich play out," Foley added.
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