Hitching A Ride To The Top

It's a good day for Douglas Adams fans, as The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy arrived on US cinema screens and made straight for the top spot. With a gross of $21 million, Adams' comedy / sci-fi classic crushed the opposition with a few well-placed stanzas of Vogon poetry and a bowl of petunias dropped from a great height. The film has taken 25 years to get to the screen, from the time that the idea was first mooted, so it is perhaps unsurprising that audiences' appetites were thoroughly whetted. The real test will be how well it does next week, when the real fanatics have had their fill and Joe Public catches a screening. Apart from that welcome success from the plucky little British sci-fi comedy that could, it's business as usual at a time of year when most of the big releases are still to come. xXx2, in contrast to the quirky box office champ, experienced a very disappointing $12.7 million on over 3400 screens, and managed only third place. The sequel, where Ice Cube replaced original star Vin Diesel, failed to make an impression, with about half the take per screen that Hitchhikers took. So much for starting the summer blockbuster season early. The Interpreter held strong in second place, with $13.8 million and a 39% drop on last week. After doing surprisingly well last week, the Kidman / Penn thriller seems to have legs. Also hanging around the top of the charts is The Amityville Horror, in fourth place with $7.8 million and a total now of $54.8 million (and on a $30 million budget, that ain't bad). Sahara is also holding on, in fifth place with $5.7 million this weekend and a total of $57 million and counting. Last week's rom-com, A Lot Like Love, managed six place with another $5 million onto its total. With only $14.6 million in two weeks, the Ashton Kutcher / Amanda Peet film has had a rather disappointing run so far, suggesting that US audiences simply aren't ready to see Kutcher in a (slightly) more serious role. Similarly, Fever Pitch, the baseball-themed remake of the Nick Hornby tale of football, fandom and finding love, is in seventh place with $3.5 million in its fourth week and a total of $36 million so far. The only other real news in the top ten was Kung-Fu Hustle, the delirious Stephen Chow film that took $3.3 million, $12.65 million in total so far (over four weeks, but it was on a limited engagement at first) and proved that you don't have to make sense or speak English to do well at the US box office. Let's hope that it has the same success here. Overall, it's a solid but unexciting week. Next week sees the true start of the summer season with Kingdom of Heaven, as well as what looks set to be another horror hit in the shape of House of Wax, and Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle and Thandie Newton in Crash.