Hurricane Irene has turned what had looked like it would be a wan weekend at the box office into a miserable one, with low estimates falling even lower.
The total weekend gross was down some 20 percent from the same weekend last year -- and down 26 percent from last weekend.
With movie theaters in the mid-Atlantic and northeast shutting down, it’s not yet even clear how many locations were open.
"It's a crazy weekend, and I don't know that anyone's going to have a perfect sense of how it all comes out until even tomorrow," Dave Hollis, Disney's executive vice president of distribution, told TheWrap Sunday morning. "The estimate from Rentrak yesterday was about a thousand theaters affected."
Even without the storm, none of the three films that opened in wide release were expected to gross impressive sums, and DreamWorks’ “The Help” -- in its third weekend -- was the No. 1 movie at theaters with $14.33 million, according to studio estimates.
A mere $10.3 million was enough to make Sony Pictures “Colombiana,” a PG-13 action film starring Zoe Saldana, the second-biggest movie of the weekend.
In its fourth week in release, Fox's "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" was in third place, grossing $9 million, according to rival studio estimates.
FilmDistrict’s “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” an R-rated remake of ABC’s 1973 television horror movie, took in an estimated $8.689 million, putting it in fourth place.
And the Weinstein Co.’s R-rated comedy “Our Idiot Brother,” was a big disappointment at just $6.588 million -- enough to cover what the Weinstein Co. and Ron Burkle’s YUK Films paid for it at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The sum put “Idiot” at fifth place.
Most of the numbers were disappointing, although "Colombiana" beat studio expectations.
Also Read: The Help: The Box Office Hit That Nearly Didn't Get Made
Sony figured it’d take in around $8 million, while outside estimates had it grossing up to $14 million.
“Don’t Be Afraid” was projected to take in between $10 million and $13 million, and “Idiot” was looking at $9 million to $12.5 million, with the Weinstein Co. hoping for anything in the double digits.
But everybody has an excuse this weekend: The storm shut down as many as 1,000 theaters on the east coast, and the New York subway system. On Saturday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered more than 370,000 people to evacuate low-lying areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
The storm is being blamed for nine deaths, and for cutting power to more than 4 million homes and businesses so far.
So people along Irene's path had more pressing concerns than the movies.
By mid-day on the East Coast, Irene had now been downgraded, and was moving into New England as a tropical storm.
