'Time' Flies at Box Office
March 4 -- As often happens during the slow early-Spring movie season, inertia was the true winner of the weekend box-office race.
Quality and star-power be damned, The Time Machine led the pack simply by merit of being a new movie loaded with special effects.
The latest adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1893 sci-fi novel (directed by his great-grandson Simon) bumped the Mel Gibson drama We Were Soldiers to second place, while the only other wide release, Ice Cube's action comedy All About the Benjamins, came in third.
Of the recent new releases, Josh Hartnett's 40 Days and 40 Nights showed a modicum of staying power (dropping from second to fourth place), while Kevin Costner's Dragonfly took a precipitous fall in its third week and Queen of the Damned staggered out of the top 10 entirely.
The greatest show of stability came from Oscar frontrunners A Beautiful Mind and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which hung tight at No. 8 and No. 10 respectively for the second week in a row.
Look for things to pick up a bit next week when Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy team up in the cop comedy Showtime and John Leguizamo, Ray Romano and Denis Leary lend their voices to a passel of computer-animated prehistoric critters in Ice Age.
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