'Social Network' Pokes Competition, Let Me In Keeps Audiences Out

David Fincher's The Social Network, about the creation of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg rode a wave of strong reviews to the top spot over its opening weekend, with an estimated box office total of $23 million.  With a budget of approximately $50 million, The Social Network will likely have very little difficult making its way into the black.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole took second place, falling a soft 33% from its opening last weekend.  With $10.8 million added to its total, for a cumulative run of $30 million, the Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) directed film will likely not recover its $100 million production budget, although family-friendly films do tend to do well on home video, so that will remain to be seen.

Last weekend's #1 film, Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, fell 47% to $10.1 million, for a third place finish.  This brings its cumulative total to $35.8 million over two weeks, measured against a modest $60 million (by Hollywood sequel terms) budget.

Fourth place went to Ben Affleck's The Town, which continued to ride strong word of mouth to a $10 million weekend.  The film is likely to turn a strong profit, as it has accumulated $64.3 million against a budget of $37 million.

Finally, the fifth place film over the weekend was Easy A, which dropped 36% from the previous weekend, adding $7 million to the total for $42.4 million to-date.  With an $8 million budget, star Emma Stone should have an easy time finding more work in indie films like this one.

Falling outside the top five were horror thrillers Let Me In and Case 39, which opened with a weak $5.3million and $5.35 million, respectively, over their initial weekends.  Let Me In is especially disappointing, given the strong reviews for the remake of Norwegian horror film Let The Right One In.  Case 39 had been sitting on the shelf for several years, and its stars (Renee Zellweger and Bradley Cooper)  refused to participate in publicity for the film.  With budgets of $20-25 million, both films will have to rely on foreign and ancillary markets to earn back their production budgets.