Battle at the Box Office 1/16

Contraband seemingly continued the January tradition of solid action movies by bringing in $24.1 million and winning the weekend.  It was one of the better Mark Wahlberg openings and was one of the best January action openings, only getting beaten by Taken.  It didn’t have as crazy an opening as the re-release of The Lion King but, minus whatever costs it takes to convert the movie to 3D, it’s still basically all profit and $18.2 million is pretty solid for a 20+ year old movie.  Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol moved down another slot down to third with $11.5 million.  Joyful Noise took the fourth place spot with $11.3 million which was an OK opening and better than last year’s January music movie, Country Strong, although that movie’s downer tone probably didn’t help.  Sherlock Holmes 2 rounded out the top 5.  Fans of schadenfreude were eagerly anticipating the certain massive drop off of The Devil Inside after it’s toxic word of mouth last weekend and it didn’t disappoint, dropping almost 77% from last weekend and plummeting to sixth place.  It’s the 19th biggest drop off ever but it still made 46x it’s budget so, unfortunately, expect more shitty found footage horror movies in the future.  The only other big movement was from The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep, which went wide over the weekend and took tenth place with $5.4 million.