The Lorax, which the Reverend Lou Dobbs teaches us is part of a plot by Obama’s friends in the liberal media to demonize the 1%, sneakily earned a lot of money for the 1% over the weekend, grossing an estimated $70.7 million dollars. It was good enough for the best opening of the year, the third-highest March opening (behind Alice in Wonderland and 300), and the sixth highest animated movie of all time. All with a sub-60% rottentomatoes score. The lesson? Don’t release all your animated films at the same time. As long as they’re not competing against each other, they’re pretty much a slam dunk. And I mean “slam dunk” in the sense that it’s easy, not in the sense that it’s something only six-foot-five black guys can do.

Elsewhere, Project X debuted in second with $20.78 million. Less than Chronicle ($22 million opening), but still a success for a movie that didn’t cost very much. It’s the third found-footage movie in a row to open higher than $20 million, so expect to see a lot of those. Which is bad, because the found footage thing kind of sucks, but at the same time it could be good, because those films don’t cost much to make. And studios tend to give filmmakers a lot more creative freedom when their film costs $10 million as opposed to $100. Just as long as they can channel that creativity into a story about a teenager holding a camera for some reason.

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Someone asked me if any good movies were coming out this weekend, and I confidently answered no. There was a crappy, derivative rom-com (The Vow), a crappy derivative Denzel Washington movie (Safe House), a crappy derivative 3D re-release of the second worst Star Wars movie, and whatever you call that one where The Rock rides giant bees (Journey 2). Amazingly, the lowest-grossing of these four (Star Wars) earned $23 million. For comparison, the top grosser last week was Chronicle (which was actually good) with $22 million. Meanwhile, C-Tates’ amnesia joint with MC Adams earned FORTY-ONE MILLION. I have no explanation for any of this, except that we’ve been punk’d by reality.

The Vow beat out Dear John (ANOTHER C-Tates joint, which opened with $30.5 million a few years ago) for the biggest Screen Gems release ever. It was also the sixth-highest February debut, and the third highest for a romantic comedy behind Valentine’s Day and Hitch.  The audience was 72 percent women, 55 percent under 25, and probably 100 percent with wet panties from that mumbly dreamboat C-Tates, the new wigger-king of America’s box office.

Also, I’ve made C-Tates into a centaur, which I’ve dubbed the Chantaur.

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You may not have noticed on account of Burnsy being too busy partying at Sony headquarters to do a Weekend Movie Guide post on Friday, but this weekend’s new major releases were the found-footage telekinesis film Chronicle, the Daniel Radcliffe horror story The Woman in Black (RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, HE’S DORKY AND BRITISH!), and Drew Barrymore’s inspirational love story set in the world of stranded whales, Big Miracle (hashtag describe your penis with a movie). Chronicle won the day with an estimated $22 million for the weekend (on a $12 million budget), with Woman in Black hot on its heels at $21 m. Almost inconceivably, given America’s love affair with speech impediments and marine mammals, Big Miracle landed all the way at number four, grossing just $8.5 million on a $40 million budget.

That sounds like a bomb, and it is, but what did they expect opening against the Super Bowl? I’m sure it will do much better next week when the fanatical Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski fans aren’t all home watching the game.

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George Lucas’s black guilt campaign failed over the weekend, as Red Tails‘ “foolish Africans” were no match for Kate Beckinsale’s hot ass fighting werewolves (or is it vampires?) in Underworld: Awakening. Underworld and Red Tails went one and two, while Marky Mark once again stopped 9/11, with Contraband beating out Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for the three spot (“HOW YOU LIKE THOSE WAHLBURGAHS, LOOZAH! GO PATS!”). Meanwhile, poor Gina Carano and Haywire opened lower than even Tom Hanks’ 9/11 film. It’s okay, baby, you still explode my tower, if you know what I mean. (I am so, so very sorry for that).

Red Tails rated 33% among critics, but received an A grade from audiences (via cinemascore), almost the inverse of Haywire‘s 82% among critics and D+ on cinemascore. Audiences apparently were so happy to see black war heroes that they ignored lines like “Die, you foolish African,” and “I guess there’s more to you coloreds than I thought!”, while critics failed to recognize that a movie that isn’t bad isn’t the same thing as one that’s good. Red Tails did an incredible job convincing black people that it was their duty to see a crappy movie because it had black people in it, while MMA fans tried to do the same with Haywire.

I’m not a black dude, so I can’t really speak to the Red Tails guilt campaign, but I’m pretty sure there were black movies before this, and there will be plenty after it, whether or not we give George Lucas our money for his uncredited remake of The Tuskeegee Airmen. But as a die-hard MMA fan, I can tell you that if I was in the habit of seeing movies just because MMA stars were in them, there are plenty of Hector Echavarria movies I could rent.

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Over the weekend, derivative, found-footage horror film The Devil Inside boldly proved to all the Oscar films it was competing against that reading is for fa99ots, and earned $34.5 million, good enough for the third-best January opening ever (behind Cloverfield and the Star Wars re-release), all on a $1 million budget. I didn’t see it because the trailer looked like a mash-up of horror movie tropes, and the found-footage conceit for movies is getting as old as the we’re-making-a-fake-documentary schtick is on TV, but all weekend I’ve been getting emails about the film’s ending, or lackthereof. It’s apparently rather abrupt, and points the audience to a website. Here’s what the filmmakers had to say about it:

Matthew Peterman [director]: We had a couple of endings that we were working on. Paramount did a really cool thing with that website (TheRossiFiles.com), to drive people to the website after the movie. We think it’s pretty cool, and that’s never really been done before, with the interactivity of that. Whether it works or not, we’ll see. Some people like it, and some people don’t, but as for the ending, and the abrupt nature of it, we played around with some stuff. But sometimes, in real life, and we tried to make this movie feel as real as possible, it doesn’t follow a three-act structure like movies do. Things don’t always end the way you expect them too, or they don’t end at the right time, or happily, either. We just tried to make a pretty realistic ending. What’s going on at the end of this film is very shocking, it’s intense, and there’s some evil going on, and it’s not always going to happen the way you expect it to. We just wanted to make it as realistic as possible. [MovieWeb]

Or, as FilmDrunkard Matthew describes it (which I guess is kind of a spoiler, even though it doesn’t get into plot details):

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