Australian cinemagoers have really sparked to an exuberantly crude comedy starring Johnny Knoxville as a crotchety 86-year-old man who reluctantly embarks on a road trip with his eight-year-old grandson.
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa grabbed $3.4 million last weekend, including Wednesday night previews. That’s a bit below Jackass 3D, which opened with $3.58 million in 2010 when the 3D boom was at its height and well before the format started to lose its lustre.
Jackass 3D finished with $10 million but the latest iteration directed by Jeff Tremaine, Knoxville’s long-time collaborator, may have stronger legs, as evidenced by its $US90 million haul in the US.
Thor: The Dark World kept drawing fans, pulling in $2.74 million in its third frame (down 38%), bringing its earnings to a lucrative $18.1 million.
Word-of-mouth can’t be good for Ridley Scott’s rambling thriller The Counselor, which plunged by 46% to $680,000, taking its tally to $2.4 million in 11 days.
James Wan’s Insidious: Chapter 2 was off by 37% in its second weekend, scoring $331,000, to push the cume to a fair $1.06 million.
Generally warm reviews and the chance to see the late, great James Gandolfini in his penultimate film helped spark interest in Enough Said. Nicole Holofcener’s romantic comedy featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a divorcee who starts a relationship with Gandolfini’s character fetched $480,000 on about 77 locations.
(Gandolfini’s final film is Animal Rescue, a crime-drama about a lost pit bull, a wannabe scam artist and a killing, co-starring Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace).
The dud of the round was director Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange. The desultory $36,000 on 38 screens might suggest many folks are bored to tears by yet another rendering of the WikiLeaks founder’s never–ending story.