Monday Morning Box Office: No. 1 Mean Girls Ensures Even More Jailbait Humor
These are the numbers that tell you exactly what America thinks about the abuse of Iraqi POWs:
1. Mean Girls — $25 million
With a huge number one finish, it's official: Writer/actor/disingenuously reluctant sex-symbol Tina Fey is skipping the lad mag photo spread and going straight to Playboy. But then she's totally done with the sexy stuff once the DVD is released because the work is really getting overshadowed, okay?
2. Man on Fire — $15 million
We said: "The headline-pun industrial complex is already preparing its "Hot Girls Put Out Denzel's Fire" riffs."
Actual Reuters prose: ""Mean Girls extinguished Man on Fire"
Genuine CNN headline: Mean Girls Douses Man on Fire
3. 13 Going On 30 — $10 million
Suffered a 53 percent drop-off once audiences were presented with the choice of jailbait trapped in the body of Jennifer Garner versus Lindsay Lohan, actual jailbait. Really, it was no contest. The genuine article always wins with the raincoat/I-was-just-putting-my-hand-in-the-popcorn, officer set.
4. Laws of Attraction — $7 million
If you felt too weird about going to Mean Girls with your teenage daughter and her friends, it was a toss-up between this and Godsend, and the numbers bear that out.
5. Godsend — $6.9 million
Even though the cloning-gone-wrong flick has no association with Disney, shareholders are demanding that Michael Eisner be keel-hauled on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride.
Bonus number: Mean Girls is Paramount's best opening since The Sum of All Fears(starring a pre-collapse Ben Affleck) with $31 million in June of 2002.