"The Final Destination" wins the first place

During the Labor Day weekend moviegoers seemed to find “The Final Destination” more interesting than “All About Steve”.

“The Final Destination” brought $12.4 million and took the first place. The expensive 3-D showings of the film once again played a factor in its box office total. The horror flick has made a total of $47.6 million in two weeks.

“All About Steve” came in second. The film brought in $11.2 million, thanks to a largely female audience. The film stars Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper, who both had huge summer hits with “The Proposal” and “The Hangover”, CDInsight reports.

Reuters quoted a 20th Century Fox official (who distributed the film) as saying, “We’re thrilled with the number” despite “Steve’s” opening weekend being significantly less then Bullock’s “The Proposal”.

It was also reported, sales for the top 12 films rose 7.5 percent from the year- ago period, a fairly strong performance considering that the screen releases were dominated by violent, R-rated movies that many younger fans can’t see, said Gitesh Pandya, editor of BoxOfficeGuru.com in New York. It was the fifth straight weekend ticket sales topped 2008 levels.

“The recession is helping the box office,” he said. “People need escapism, and movies are relatively inexpensive.”

“The Final Destination” is the fourth film in a series and it follows a group of teens who try to cheat death after one of them has a premonition of a fatal accident. Last weekend’s debut was the highest opening weekend for the franchise.

The film ‘All About Steve’ is the seventh by Time Warner Inc. this year to debut in first. “All About Steve,” a romantic comedy from News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox, features Bullock as a crossword-puzzle creator who becomes infatuated with a news cameraman after a blind date.

Bloomberg reports, the movie did better than some analysts had expected after it was savaged by critics, Pandya said. The movie may have gotten a boost from the success of “The Proposal,” released in June, which reinvigorated the 45-year-old actress as a romantic- comedy star, he said.

In the meantime, the only art house film to open this week was Cherien Dabis' dramatic comedy Amreeka. The film managed to garner the highest per screen average, taking in an estimated $50,000 at just 4 screens. That's an average of $12,500 per theater. If Amreeka had been given the 3,121 screens that Final Destination held down this week, it would have pulled in $39 million to be the highest grossing film of Labor Day weekend.

Next weekend will see a host of new films including 9, Whiteout, Sorority Row, and Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself. It's a pretty easy call that Tyler Perry will own this coming weekend, MovieWeb reports.