It was meat feast for Sony this weekend when its latest CG animation Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs stormed to the top of the US weekend box office, opening on a chunky $30.1m. Over half of its receipts came from 3D screenings.
Inspired by a (presumably very) popular children's picturebook, **Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs **eclipsed the feats of Sony's previous best 'toon opening, Open Season, to rack up the highest ever September animation opening. After the flop that was Surf's Up, it's timely encouragement that the studio can compete against the monsters, nut-chasing squirrels or talking dogs of its rival animators, albeit on a smaller scale.
It was a so-so weekend for Steven Soderbergh's latest, The Informant!. Grosses of $10.5m** **may have been dwarfed by Ocean's Thirteen, but looks like good business for the offbeat whistleblower comedy, especially after Che's opening of $61,000.
Nothing much was happening for Jennifer Aniston or Love Happens ($8.5m), her soapy romance co-starring Aaron Eckhart. Alongside **Jennifer's Body **($6.8m), it was the weekend's biggest non-performer, with audiences proving surprisingly resistant to Ms Fox's murderous antics or range of headline-grabbing verbal Bayhem.
Tyler Perry's** I Can Do Bad All By Myself** dropped sharply, but still accrued another $10.1 million to make a ten-day total of $37.9m.
Somewhere in the southern reaches of the box office, Quentin Tarantino's band of **Inglourious Basterds **continued their spree, pulling in another $3.6m to overhaul Pulp Fiction as QT's highest grossing movie. With $109.9m after nearly five weeks on release, Weinstein Company business is officially booming.