Weekend box office: Bruno, we hardly knew ye

"Bruno" came out of its opening weekend with an estimated $30.4 million, more than the $26.5 million made by Sacha Baron Cohen's last movie, "Borat," when it debuted in November, 2006. Yet the new film is already being dismissed as a commercial failure while the first was considered a breakthrough smash. How is this possible?

Let's go to the per-theater averages. "Borat" opened in 837 theaters with a stunning $31,600 PTA, then blew out the following week to 2,566 theaters and still averaged $11,000 at each. Fox correctly figured that however much they advertised the movie, word of mouth would do the heavy lifting; thus, the modified platform release.

With "Bruno," Universal took the opposite tack by opening in 2,756 theaters with an advertising promo blitzkrieg, possibly hoping to leverage audiences' fondness for Cohen before they actually saw the movie. It may have been the wisest possible move, since word of mouth buzz for "Bruno" seems to be going negative in a hurry: The movie made $14.4 million -- almost half its weekend gross -- on Friday before declining 39% on Saturday, one of the steeper drop-offs on record. "Bruno," in other words, is toast. Universal knows it too, mentioning through a spokesperson that, well, the company only paid $43 million for distribution rights, so it's not taking a bath like with its other movies this summer. Still, don't remind them that Fox paid only $18 million for "Borat."

There was only one other newcomer in multiplexes, the teen romcom "I Love You, Beth Cooper," which came in at No. 7 and eked a fairly pathetic $5 million at 1,800 theaters. The stalwarts in the spots above it were "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," down a not-bad 34% its second week; "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" in its third week and still making truly obscene amounts of money; "Public Enemies" tailing off 45% its second week, then "The Proposal," then "The Hangover."

Down in the bottom half of the charts where the good movies live (I kid) (not really), "The Hurt Locker" went semi-wide to 60 theaters its third week and was propelled by a critical lovefest to a very nice $10,686 per-theater average. See this movie, please. "Humpday," sort of a slacker indie "I Love You, Man" meets "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," opened at two theaters and averaged $14,369 at each. It lands in Boston on July 24.

By the way, the summer's big winners so far appear to be "Transformers" ($339 million total gross to date), "Up" ($274 million), "Star Trek" ($251 million), "The Hangover" ($222 million), and then a big drop-off to "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" ($170 million). The only titles that even remotely pose a challenge are "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," Disney's guinea pig action movie "G-Force" (go ahead, laugh -- "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" made $94 million last year), and maybe "Funny People," which on the plus side has Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, and Seth Rogen (and Leslie Mann) and on the debit (at least in box office terms) has an R rating, a 136-minute running time, and a lead character with cancer. Whee!

More box office finagling at Box Office Mojo.