OK, this is pretty cool: The top grossing film at the box office last week was the second full weekend of Inception, which took in more than $42 million on 3,792 screens. That’s a lot, obviously. Second for the weekend was the debut of Salt, on 3,612 screens, with $36 mil. It goes on — from No. 3 Despicable Me (3,600 locales) to No. 10, Predators (1,846 screens) at about $3 million.
And then there’s No. 11: The Kids Are All Right. The gay-themed film, which we reviewed last week, took in about $2.6 million. But here’s the big news: It did so on 201 screens. Yep, less than a 10th of most of the films in the top 10. In the case of Predators, which has been in release the same length of time, that’s a per-screen average of about 10 times more for Kids. Per screen, it even beat Inception by a comfortable margin — $4,300 versus about $3,700.
Now, I’m not saying Kids is in the running to replace the big blockbusters as the top movie of the summer. (Kids has so far grossed about $5 million — the top film of the year, Toy Story 3, has made $380 million.) But I am saying there’s a lot of support out there for gay-interest movies that aren’t about oversexed twinks or 20-something lesbians getting it on behind their boyfriends’ backs. It’s a move toward normalcy that I like.
