Jackass, starring Johnny Knoxville and his band of pranksters in what a studio executive described as "the Three Stooges on steroids," earned US$28.1 million (HK$219.18 million) during its first three days to beat a studio target of US$23 million, its distributor Paramount Pictures said.
The film won unlikely critical praise from major media outlets, a factor that producers feared would turn off its target audience of men under 25.
"The thing that really flipped us out was that it got good reviews," said Van Toffler of MTV Network.
Young males also turned out for Jet Li's Fearless, a martial arts film from Focus Features' Rogue Pictures unit that as expected earned US$10.6 million in its first week to grab the No2 box office slot.
Football drama Gridiron Gang, last week's top film, brought in US$9.7 million in its second week, dropping 33 percent to take the third slot.
Moviegoer apathy and critical scorn hit the week's other two new releases - World War I flying adventure Flyboys, distributed by Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer, and Sony Pictures' All the King's Men, a remake of an Oscar-winning 1949 film based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize- winning novel.
Flyboys, the first film released under MGM's new plan to distribute films from other studios rather than investing in its own, finished fourth with US$6 million in ticket sales. Producer Dean Devlin had hoped for a US$10 million opening weekend for the film, which cost about US$80 million to make.
The seventh-place debut for All the King's Men, starring Sean Penn, Jude Law and Kate Winslet, was presaged by its cool reception at the Toronto Film Festival this month and, at US$3.8 million, fell far below expectations.
REUTERS
