Four years and eleven months to the day after the 9/11 attacks, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center opened to expected box office acclaim. But it hasn't happened: Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby is still number one in the US weekend box office.
Of course, this is a huge surprise – ask anyone in late 2001 what they'd do if a slightly made-for-TV looking movie about one of the most vivid moments in modern history was beaten in the weekend box office by a film about a funny man driving a car and the most godawful dancing films in living memory and they'd have shot you dead. Still, let's look on the bright side, eh? Now that both United 93 and World Trade Center have underperformed at the weekend box office, at least we won't have to worry about a flood of opportunistic, tasteless 9/11 movies until at least September 11 2011.
Not even a publicity stunt like getting 24 men to try and blow up a bunch of planes with some baby milk at the weekend could get World Trade Center to the number one US weekend box office spot. Maybe this shows that the public isn't ready for films about America's greatest terrorist attack, or maybe it shows that the public still thinks that Nicolas Cage is a bit of a douchebag, who knows? Here's this week's US weekend box office top five…
1 – Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby (Insert "If we stop going to see knockabout comedies about idiots driving cars that are slightly derivative of Anchorman, then they've won," comment here. $23,000,000
2 – Step Up (Step Up, then. The movie that conclusively proves that trite films about performing arts students on a rite of passage and dancing a bit are more popular than dreadfully animated cartoons about a funny cow and harrowing films about aircraft exploding into busy office towers) $21,065,000
3 – World Trade Center (On the whole, it's probably a good thing that World Trade Center didn't reach the top of the US weekend box office, even though we had especially prepared a Big Book Of Pithy Jokes About Monumental Terrorist Atrocities for that exact occasion) $19,016,000
4 – Barnyard (It's good to know that the creators of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius are still too dumb to know that male cows don't actually have udders. However, it does explain why they've been pumping bull semen all over their cornflakes like there's no tomorrow.) $10,069,000
5 – Pulse (Someone somewhere must have decided that making a horror film starring Christina Milian where the villain is fucking Bluetooth was a good thing to do. We want to find that person and slap them in their mouth.) $8,456,000
Read more:
Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo
[story by Stuart Heritage]