Box office results: ‘Rise of The Planet of The Apes’ barely beats ‘The Help’ movie

The weekend box office numbers are in, and “The Help” movie nearly was able to topple the latest installment in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise despite having a much more limited target audience.
Let’s start with the box-office kings. For “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” grossing $27.5 million is close to a 50% drop from its opening weekend — but it’s hard for anyone to really complain since the movie was initially expected to just open in the $30-35 million range its first weekend. Overall, the James Franco / Andy Serkis movie now has almost $105 million in its coffers.
As for “The Help,” we once again saw it exceed expectations yet again since first debuting in theaters on Wednesday. With $25.5 for the weekend, the Emma Stone / Viona David period piece now has $34.5 million in the bank. Although we don’t know the official budget for the movie just yet, we can pretty much guarantee that this movie is going to be turning a nice profit for Disney and DreamWorks.
As for the other new releases, they were all a bit of a disappointment. “Final Destination 5” was #3 with $18 million (not a great number considering horror movies tend to drop fast), while “30 Minutes or Less” was #5 with $13 million. We’re going to have more of a specific analysis of “Glee Live! 3D” soon, but let’s just say that it didn’t even make the top ten.
What did you see this weekend?
Photo: 20th Century Fox