'Time Traveler's Wife' is...a hit

By Steven Zeitchik

Star Trek. Transformers 2. The Time Traveler's Wife

It sounds wacky, but on a pound-for-pound basis, the romance based (loosely) on Audrey Niffenegger's hot novel should be considered one the more successful openings of the summer, up there with the biggest studio tentpoles.



The $19 million figure that the Eric Bana-Rachel McAdams weepie posted is by many standards a very ordinary result. It's not the highest opening of the month; it's not even the second-highest opening of the

weekend (that honor went to another sudsy romance, G.I. Joe).



And yet the Warners/New Line movie cost a shade under $40m, which means that it earned back half its budget on opening weekend, a ratio every studio on the planet would sign for. Most of the top-earning tentpoles this summer did exactly that -- a $75m opening for the $150m+ "Star Trek," a $109m for the $200+m "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

If you really strike paydirt you can earn back your entire production budget the first weekend, a rare feat which Warners did earlier in the season with "The Hangover" and investors will do with "District 9" this weekend (more on the weekend's even bigger success story, and the viral campaign that

enabled it, shortly).



But doing lo-budget breakouts is a lot easier said than done -- namely, the first part's easy, and the second part is hard to do. And that's where TTW comes in.



The pic won't hold up in the coming weekends (it actually fell over the course of this weekend more than it should have). But this wasn't exactly a candidate for most marketed movie of the year. And when you consider how low the expectations were for the pic (which got thrown around the calendar more than a Peyton Manning football, and then got sacked by critics to boot), it's kind of impressive. The one thing you can wonder about is what would have happened if studio execs had opted to open the time-jumping tale in a month other than August. If only they could turn back the clock.

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