Box Office Weekend: Iron Man 2 Goes Gold

Tony Stark rules. Iron Man 2, continuing the adventures of the zillionaire industrialist-scientist who makes himself a new heart and a nifty suit to encase it in, jump-started the summer blockbuster season with a Mother’s Day weekend take of $133.6 million, according to early studio estimates. Eschewing the filigree, and thus the higher ticket prices, of three dimensions, Iron Man 2-D still had the fifth highest opening in North American movie history, after The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, Twilight Saga: New Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest — all of which were released in the old-fashioned flat format.

If you wonder, with a sigh, why Hollywood is awash in retreads, just consider the math. Of the top 25 opening weekends, sequels fill all but five slots: Alice in Wonderland, the first Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Harry Potter films and The Passion of the Christ. These five exceptions all had brand recognition from the get-go, being based on a famous children’s book, a comic book or a Good Book. And we wouldn’t be surprised if some studio mogul hadn’t begged Mel Gibson to make The Resurrection of the Christ.

(See pictures of how superheroes fly.)

The Marvel smarty-hero has already earned nearly $200 million abroad; Paramount opened the film a week early in the rest of the world (excluding Japan) to avoid competition with the World Cup, which will dominate fans’ interest for a month beginning June 11. “Many countries come to a standstill during the World Cup games, especially if the home team is playing,” Veronika Kwan-Rubinek, Warner Bros. international distribution president, told the Hollywood Reporter. “In the football-crazy countries, theater admissions are down dramatically on the days of the games, and event movies that need a male audience suffer.” Stay tuned to see how the World Cup will affect the worldwide grosses of blockbuster wannabes like Shrek Forever After and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

(See why 2010 is the year of the remake.)

Compared with Iron Man 2‘s magnetic gross, all other box-office returns were puny; the other films in the top 10 earned less than $40 million. But How to Train Your Dragon and Date Night held on to their respective audiences, with the DreamWorks cartoon passing the $200 million domestic mark and the Tina Fey–Steve Carell rom-com-disaster movie topping $80 million. Among 2010 releases, Dragon is the third biggest hit worldwide, having earned more than $400 million globally. It follows Alice in Wonderland at $960 million and Clash of the Titans at $432 million. Iron Man 2 will pass Dragon and Clash within a week or so; it’s aiming for a billion worldwide.

Now, what to get Mom for Mother’s Day? “Buy her candy or some flowers or a brand-new hat,” Tom Lehrer suggested in his jaunty old song “Oedipus Rex.” Or, two distributors hoped, take her to a nice new indie film with maternal inclinations. The docu-dorable Babies, which traces the lives of four infants around the world, opened in 535 theaters and earned $1.6 million to snag 10th place for the weekend. The other debut, Mother and Child, Rodrigo Garcia’s soft-focus triptych starring Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington, earned $44,488 on four screens.

Elsewhere in the Lilliput of indie movies, where successful grosses are measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not the hundred millions, the faux-doc Exit Through the Gift Shop ascended to a total of $934,415 in its fourth week, according to IndieWire’s Peter Knegt; and the Michael Caine drama Harry Brown inched up to $381,070 in its second week. The Iron Man of indies remains The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, now nearing $5 million in domestic ticket sales (and a sensational $88 million abroad, mostly in Europe).

But the big news in specialized movies was the spiffy restoration of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, which earned an astounding $20,000 this weekend at Manhattan’s Film Forum rep house. The silent-film parable, about a titan of industry and a mad-genius scientist who creates a robot human, could be the blueprint for Iron Man and a thousand other science-fiction epics. Eighty-three years after its premiere, Metropolis is still connecting with audiences. We wonder if Iron Man 2 will do the same in the year 2093.

Here are the Sunday estimates of the weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1. Iron Man 2, $133.6 million, first weekend
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street, $9.2 million; $48.5 million, second week
3. How to Train Your Dragon, $6.8 million; $201.1 million, seventh week
4. Date Night, $5.3 million; $80.9 million, fifth week
5. The Back-Up Plan, $4.3 million; $29.4 million, third week
6. Furry Vengeance, $4 million; $11.6 million, second week
7. Clash of the Titans, $2.3 million; $157.8 million, sixth week
8. Death at a Funeral, $2.1 million; $38.3 million, fourth week
9. The Losers, $1.8 million; $21.45 million, third week
10. Babies, $1.6 million, first week