I noticed an unusual number of young girls clutching dolls at a multiplex on Saturday afternoon. This made me very nervous. I know it's summer and school's out, but the early Saturday crowd tends to be non-teenage people like me who try and catch up with the latest Hollywood releases without the distractions of the Friday/Saturday night teen crowd. What were all the young girls coming to see? Kung Fu Panda? Get Smart? Sex and the City? Nope, the hordes of girls were lining up politely to see the latest trendy indie release: Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. One of the last three releases from distributor Picturehouse, which is due to shut down completely very soon, Kit Kittredge may be based on a doll, yet has further indie cred thanks to Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin. And maybe all those little girls will grow up to write their own Juno some day? In any case, the film opened in five theaters in five cities, two weeks in advance of a wide release, and grossed a super impressive $44,600 per screen, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo.
Picturehouse also scored with another one of their last-gasp releases, the Mongolian war-mongering Mongol, which expanded to 94 screens and turned in a muscular performance of $7,914 per screen.
Even more impressive, numbers-wise, Werner Herzog's Antarctica doc Encounters at the End of the World continued to draw big at the one theater where it's playing in Manhattan: $17,600.
Next up on the per-screen imaginary chart, romantic drama Brick Lane (Sony Pictures Classics) opened at seven locations and acquitted itself nicely with $7,214 per screen. Jeffrey M. Anderson called it "lazy, useless," so we definitely know where he stands.
Far below that came family drama When Did You Last See Your Father? (Sony Pictures Classics), which made $2,711 per-screen at 26 screens in its third week of release. Hmm, I would have thought that such a film would have fared better in the father's day climate of June, but evidently not.
Switching to box office analyst Leonard Klady at Movie City News, he includes romantic drama Expired (IFC) below Brick Lane and above Father, saying that the film's single theatrical engagement in Manhattan pulled in $5,240.
