‘Blades of Glory’ puts box office on ice

‘Meet the Robinsons’ time-travels into second place

Dreamworks Pictures

Will Ferrell and Jon "Napoleon Dynamite" Heder play feuding figure skaters who must team up on ice.

NBC VIDEO

Will Ferrell, leading man?
April 2: NBC's Dawn Fratangelo reports that Will Ferrell and his "Blades of Glory" are tops at the box office.

Today show

Movie video

‘Up in the Air’ L.A. premiere
Dec. 1: George Clooney, along with co-stars Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman, hit the red carpet in Westwood, Calif., where they talked about what makes this film so timely and what attracted them to the project.

'New Moon' nearly Blind Sided at box office

A look at 'Avatar The Game'

On the set with Diane Lane

Natalie Portman kicks off toy drive

Slideshow

December movies
James Cameron’s spectacle “Avatar” hits theaters, along with George Clooney, who is “Up in the Air,” and Robert Downey Jr. as “Sherlock Holmes.”

more photos

updated 9:13 a.m. ET April 2, 2007

LOS ANGELES - Stars-on-ice Will Ferrell and Jon Heder took the box office gold for the weekend.

Paramount and DreamWorks’ “Blades of Glory,” with Ferrell and Heder playing figure-skating rivals who become the sport’s first men’s pair, debuted as the No. 1 movie with $33 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Disney’s animated adventure “Meet the Robinsons,” about the time-traveling journey of a brilliant but lonely orphan, debuted in second place with $25.1 million.

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

The previous weekend’s top movie — the Warner Bros. animated tale “TMNT,” a revival of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” franchise — slipped to fourth place with $9.2 million, down a steep 62 percent from its $24.3 million debut. “TMNT” raised its 10-day total to $38.4 million.

Slideshow
Will Ferrell’s wonderful world
Will Ferrell's crazy characters rule small screens and large, from 'Saturday Night Live' to 'Land of the Lost.'
more photos
After a monthlong surge, the overall box office declined. The top 12 movies took in $115 million, down 13 percent from the same weekend last year, when “Ice Age: The Meltdown” opened with $68 million.

“This is still a good weekend, a pretty healthy one-two punch with ‘Blades of Glory’ and ‘Meet the Robinsons’ at the top,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers.

Movie attendance is up 4 percent so far this year, Dergarabedian said.

Box office results
Estimated ticket sales for Nov. 27-29
1. “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” $42.5 million.
2. “The Blind Side,” $40.1 million.
3. “2012,” $18 million.
4. “Old Dogs,” $16.8 million.
5. “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” $16 million.
6. “Ninja Assassin,” $13.1 million.
7. “Planet 51,” $10.2 million.
8. “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire,” $7.1 million.
9. “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” $7 million.
10. “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” $1.5 million.

Teaming with “Napoleon Dynamite” star Heder on “Blades of Glory,” Ferrell scored the second-best opening of his career, behind last summer’s “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” which took in $47 million in its first weekend.

“It starts with a great concept, and the whole picture was cast so well,” said DreamWorks spokesman Marvin Levy. “Another part of the surprise was, we got a ton of very, very good reviews.”

“Meet the Robinsons” played in about 3,400 theaters and did especially well in a 3-D version at 600 cinemas, said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney. The studio did not have a precise breakdown, but cinemas reported that screens playing the 3-D version pulled in about double the grosses of theaters running the regular 2-D version, Viane said.