It’s always nice to start the week with good news and though I don’t have your STD test results, I can tell you that a Martin Scorsese film (Shutter Island) wiped its ass with Ashton Kutcher’s Al-Qaeda recruitment tape at the box office.  Shutter Island‘s $40.2 million opening weekend was a career best for both Scorsese and DiCaprio.  Reached for comment, Shutter Island author Dennis Lehane said, “To celebrate, Me n Leanahdo n Mahty ah gonna go pahty with some hookahs and then kill the sonovabitch priest who molested my daughtah.”

Meanwhile, Valentine’s Day suffered a massive 70% drop from last weekend, which is a nice bit of schadenfreude, but with an $87.5 million domestic gross thus far on a $52 million budget, it’s probably not enough to keep the mullahs who financed it from making another one.  And who wants to bet this kid won’t be blowing guys for heroine in a couple years?  “C’mon, man, make it $20, I was in a movie with Ashton Kutcher.”  Just what the world needs, another drug-addicted former child star.  Or worse, Danny Masterson.

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Over the weekend, vacuous sorority girls all over the country dragged their neutered boyfriends along to see what would happen if an issue of Us Weekly and a little-kid-holding-a-rose-bouquet poster had a retarded baby.  The girls laughed when they were expected to laugh, the guys discussed finance, and a million satisfactory evenings were capped off with adequate, missionary-style sex.  Thus Valentine’s Day earned $54.4 million and became the number one movie at the box office.

The success of the film, an interconnected story of clichés that happen to white people, all but guarantees Hollywood will try to make 10 more of these barely-assembled buckets of smelly yak twat.  As an educated, middle-class white person, I’m sort of the target demographic, but the truth is, this movie makes me want to join Al-Qaeda.   In fact, I think that was the tagline.  ”Valentine’s Day, an Al-Qaeda-financed recruitment video starring Ashton Kutcher.”

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(Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, a bear ate the script.)

I usually do a Box Office wipe up on Monday morning, but there isn’t much to report this week. Avatar swallowed everything in its path, and none of the new releases did particularly well (top ten list after the jump).  The only bright spot was all the bad reviews for Leap Year, the latest your-rural-lifestyle-ruined-my-Blackberry “comedy” that Hollywood pinched on our collective chest.  You know it’s bad when movie guy on Taxi TV in NYC calls it “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”  On Taxi TV!  His only job is getting people to spend money on stuff!  Yeah, this is gonna be fun:

What makes “Leap Year” so singularly dispiriting is precisely that it is bad without distinction — so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in a strictly technical sense. [...] Their initial antagonism might be promising if either one did or said anything funny, clever, provocative or even slightly memorable. Instead there are exchanges like the following, on the subject of the supposed tradition that gives this movie its title.

Declan: It’s a load of poo.
Anna: No it isn’t. It’s romantic.

Much as one hates to contradict a lady, the gentleman has a point. -New York Times [Editor's Note: Ho snap!]

Amy Adams gets cow poo on her shoes. Then she falls in the mud. -Salon

Mid-January, and already there’s another romantic comedy that makes you weep for the genre. Honestly. After “P.S. I Love You,” “27 Dresses,” “Bride Wars,” and “The Ugly Truth,” Beatrice and Benedick from “Much Ado About Nothing” are going to step right out of the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s play and go on a revenge killing spree. -Chicago Tribune

Hahahah, yeah!  What that guy said!  About Shakespeare!  *claps flippers together, scratches butt, smells finger, falls out of tree*

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(“They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom, because this, this is our independence day, meow meow I’m king of the cat-monkeys, coo coo ka choo.”)

Over the weekend, Avatar passed Dark Knight to become the fifth movie in history to earn more than $1 billion worldwide (domestically, Dark Knight still leads by about $180m).  Number one all-time is Titanic, and now that Avatar stands at number four, James Cameron has directed two of the five (see the top five after the jump).  Sources say that upon hearing the news, he barbecued a unicorn over a slow-burning pit of $100 dollar bills, and after his personal chef finished it with a fine truffle and komodo-dragon sauce, a high-priced call girl spit it into his mouth while she pleasured herself with a gold bar.  And then the block quotes came:

“Avatar” has an advantage over those other billion-dollar movies: About 75 percent of its domestic business has come from theaters showing it in 3-D [which costs more].
[Overall] the year was strong but not a modern record-breaker for number of tickets sold. According to Hollywood.com, domestic admissions came in at 1.42 billion in 2009, the most in the last five years, though well below the modern record of 1.6 billion in 2002.
In Hollywood’s glory years of the 1930s and ’40s, before television eroded the movie audience, estimated movie attendance ran as high as 4 billion some years.
“Leave it to James Cameron to do this. To not only set the technical world on fire, the visual world on fire, but also the box-office world on fire 12 years after `Titanic,’” said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. [ABCNews]

Gee, Paul, that is some brilliant analysis.  “So you’re saying he did it by setting things on fire…” Michael Bay muttered to himself while quietly petting his cheetah.

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As a whole, Christmas weekend be breakin’ box office records, son:

• Biggest Friday through Sunday gross ever
• Biggest Christmas box office ever
• Most tickets ever sold in a three-day period (37.3 million)
• First weekend that three separate movies grossed more than $50 million each.

Sadly, one of those three movies was Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.   Nonetheless, Hollywood studio execs are calling this windfall the best Christmas present ever, despite them all of them being Jews.  Other facty things:

• Avatar fell only 2.6% from its opening weekend, which is impressive considering a 40-60% drop is standard for Blockbusters these days (though it should be noted that three other movies did more business than last week)
• Sherlock Holmes set a record for a Christmas-Day opening with $24.9 million
• Alvin & the Chipmunks audiences were mostly families and “heavily Latino.”  I thought that was kind of funny because I didn’t know they even kept track of that stuff.  They don’t ask when you buy a ticket, do they?  Maybe they just take the number of stabbings and extrapolate.  *whacks piñata*
• Nine bombed.  It earned about $5.5 million in almost 1500 theaters.  Weinstein is pulling it from the Midwest to focus advertising on the coasts.  The Weinstein Company was already in financial trouble and Nine cost them $64 million.  Which is a lot to pay for what appears to be the world’s longest perfume commercial.  Toldja, dudes, next time go with the hooker yacht.  If there’s better investment than a hooker yacht, I don’t know what it is.

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