Entertainment

A Box-Office Blast-Off

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 13, 2000 / 10:44 AM EST / CBS

Launched into U.S. theaters this weekend, Mission To Mars blasted to the top of the box-office charts.

The sci-fi thriller proved that filmgoers can't get enough of outer space themes, taking in $23.1 million on its opening weekend, reports CBS Early Show contributor Gail O'Neill.

Audiences "starved for something that looked like an event picture" pushed it into first place despite scathing reviews, said Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc., which tracks box-office receipts.

Mars stars Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise as members of a team sent to rescue the first manned mission to the Red Planet.

It dislodged The Whole Nine Yards from the No. 1 spot after three weeks. The hitman comedy tumbled to fourth place with $5.4 million, according to Sunday estimates at Hollywood .com. Final figures were expected Monday.

Untitled

"The public voted with their pocketbooks and we were obviously clearly the runaway hit here," said Chuck Viane, president of distribution for Buena Vista Pictures.

Roman Polanski's supernatural thriller The Ninth Gate kept the path open at the box office, earning $6.7 million to put in in second place. My Dog Skip is still doing well for a small movie. It sunk its claws into third place with $6.04 million.

Getting close to the magic $100 million mark, American Beauty grossed $3.66 million this weekend and took fifth place at the boix-office on a weekend when it also took in a handful of awards from the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild. It is expected to reach the $100 million landmark next weekend.

The Cider House Rules continued to do well, following its Academy Award nomination. It took sixth place with a box-office take of $3.58 million.

Drowning Mona fell from fourth to seventh place, grossing $3.46 million, while Madonna's The Next Best Thing tumbled from second to eighth place with $3.35 million.

Rounding out the top 10, Pitch Black and Snow Day tied at $3.1 million each.

Carefully placed to avoid competition, Mars debuted amid holdover comedies and adult dramas. It had more than a third of the total gross for the weekend's top 12 pictures, Dergarabedian said.

"It may be the film that jump-starts the box office again," Dergarabedian said. "We've been going in fits and starts... every time we have a big opener, then the following weekend we're down again."

Mars also was the best movie opening for director Brian De Palma since Mission: Impossible, which took in $45.4 million in a May 1996 debut weekend.

Howeer, Mars could face competition from an upcoming series of high-profile debuts, starting with Julia Roberts' Erin Brokovich on Friday.

"There is not a week between now and late April that there is not a clearly defined No. 1 film, at least on paper," Viane said.

Mars may have been a successful expedition at the box office, but was it true to scientific fact?

"They get the physics right," says Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of New York's Hayden Planetarium. "They get their orbits right. They get the gravity right, Zero G and otherwise."

While Tyson applauded the film for its honesty and attention to the dangers of space travel, he did criticize Hollywood for one unoriginal space image.

"This alien had the triangle-shaped heads, almond eyes, long, skinny limbs, four fingers," he says. "With modern day budgets for modern day sci-fi films, I thought, surely, you could be a little more creative than throwing in the same old tired alien."
He did have praise for the the way filmmakers depicted the surface of Mars: "Apart from a few scenes that look like the characters are in Arizona, which is everybody's favorite landscape, they did very well."