As Hollywood has known since the 1960s, heist films, also known as caper movies, are generally a good box office draw, and this week’s strong opening performance by The Town confirms that truism. The Ben Affleck-directed film about Boston bank robbers finished first in U.S. movie box office receipts over the weekend with a decent $23.8 million, about 50 percent more than industry analysts had expected.
That’s a very decent performance for a film with no big stars in its cast and a cost of $32 million. The film received very good reviews—93 percent positive, according to RottenTomatoes.com.
Affleck is proving himself a capable director, after Gone, Baby, Gone and this film.
Takers, another heist movie, topped the movie box office three weeks ago, without the benefit of positive reviews (but audiences disagreed, rating it twice as positively as critics).
Other new releases were the positively reviewed romantic comedy Easy A, which came in second with $18.2 million, and Devil, which finished third with $12.6 million despite having the box-office poison of M. Night Shyamalan attached to it as the film’s producer.
The animated film Alpha and Omega stumbled out of the gate, finishing fifth with $9.2 million. Hampered by overly cutesy animation and a story line about animals mating (yes, you read that right), the film, which has nothing to do with religion despite its title, was poorly received by audiences and critics alike, with only 15 percent of the latter approving the film.
This week added to the recent trend of new films with religious words or allusions in their titles, with the titles of the top fifteen films including the words Devil, Afterlife, Alpha and Omega, Pray, and Exorcism. Might be a coincidence, might be a trend. We’ll see.