Word: box
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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PAUL BLART: MALL COP breaks dog-movie stranglehold on American box office...
...keeping with the "sacrifice" theme of his new Administration, many heeded the summons, doing good deeds at soup kitchens and homeless shelters. But millions of others just went to the movies. I was one of them. I hadn't seen the three films that topped the weekend box office and was curious to know what was luring the public, in such vast numbers, out of their overmortgaged homes and into the cold. I saw a horror movie, a musical biopic and a comedy; I heard America screaming, singing and laughing...
...what's bad for the economy is good for movies. And though employers might rue the lost work in a day off for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Hollywood loves long weekends, which put the public in a moviegoing mood. In the past four days the North American box office registered nearly $250 million - the highest ever for an M.L.K. weekend, and among the top 10 weekends ever - and each of the four new releases earned more than $20 million. My Bloody Valentine killed (grossing $24.2 million); Notorious was B.I.G. ($24 million); Hotel for Dogs ($22.5 million) continued...
...Halloween and Black Christmas, exploitation filmmakers scurried for other holidays to turn into horrors. In 1981 some Canadian geniuses got the notion to add psychopathic gore to the day of romantic mush and put it all to the title of an old Rodgers and Hart song. The gaudy box-office take for My Bloody Valentine's 3-D remake will surely cue more feast-day gorefests. Expect to see The Scarin' of the Green on St. Patrick's Day and Peter Choppin'tail for Easter, as well as My Pukey Purim and, every four years, Inauguration Day: Fear Itself...
...dominated the weekend box office: Biggie and Kevin James. (Thin Clint was the middle of the sandwich.) The title of the James film both spelled out its modest intentions and lacked the inspired oxymoronia of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (which lacked any other redeeming feature). Most of the big critics skipped the ordeal of reviewing Mall Cop and handed it off to second-stringers, who pounded the film pretty savagely. So of course I had to find it ... almost semi-recommendable. Anyway, an easy...