Vampires sink teeth into movie audiences
David Germain

LOS ANGELES—The horror tale “30 Days of Night” had three days of box-office bite. The Sony fright flick, with Josh Hartnett leading Alaskans against ravenous vampires that turn up for the prolonged winter darkness, debuted as the weekend’s No. 1 movie with $16 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Audiences continued to choose merriment over misery as the latest crop of sober Academy Awards hopefuls, among them Ben Affleck’s “Gone Baby Gone,” Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Rendition” and Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro’s “Things We Lost in the Fire,” debuted with so-so to dismal numbers.
Whether it’s the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deadly news out of Pakistan and Myanmar or Friday’s stock market tumble, moviegoers seem disinterested in more bad news at theatres with films about child-kidnapping, torture, widowhood and heroin addiction.
“Fall is the season of the serious movie, and it seems like audiences in a way are resisting the serious movie right now,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. “Audiences are finding their horror or their intensity in real life, and they’re not looking for it in the movies.”
Other escapist fare joined “30 Days of Night” at the top of the box-office chart. “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?”, the Lionsgate release that was the previous weekend’s No. 1 flick, slipped to second place with $12.1 million, raising its total to $38.9 million.
Disney’s family comedy “The Game Plan” held up well at No. 3 with $8.1 million, lifting its four-week total to $69.2 million. Affleck made his directing debut with Miramax’s “Gone Baby Gone,” which debuted at No. 5 with $6 million. The critically acclaimed movie stars the filmmaker’s brother, Casey Affleck, as a private detective trying to solve a young girl’s abduction. Coming in on par with “Gone Baby Gone” was Fox Atomic’s “The Comebacks,” a lowbrow spoof of sports movies that opened at No. 6 with $5.85 million.