'Hardball' Tops Weekend Box Office

Sept. 17 -- Americans sought relief from the national catastrophe at the movies this weekend, making Keanu Reeves' inspirational Little League drama Hardball the highest-grossing film in the land.

Early September is always a slow time at the box office, yet though less money was spent at the movies than on any other weekend this year, the total box office was still up 43 percent from a year ago, when another Reeves movie, The Watcher, topped the charts with a meager $5.8 million.

The weekend's only other major release, the teen thriller The Glass House, had an anemic second place finish, but still did OK for a movie that looks liked it's been shelved for awhile (Leelee Sobieski's brother acts like his evil guardians have given him the greatest of gifts when he gets an old-school PlayStation; in this PS2 era, their gift would be all he needed to see past their false smiles).

Last weekend's champs, The Musketeer and Two Can Play That Game, dropped a bit, and the rest of the list was largely comprised of summer survivors with word-of-mouth on their side: Rush Hour 2, The Others, etc. Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston's Rock Star nearly fell off the list in its second weekend, bringing up the rear with just $3.5 million.

The box office race for coming weeks will be hard to predict, as many films scheduled to open soon have been pushed back briefly (Training Day, with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke, now opens Oct. 5 instead of Sept. 21) or indefinitely (Tim Allen's Big Trouble, scheduled for a Sept. 21 release, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage, slated for Oct. 5, have both been pushed back indefinitely), so Rock Star could make a little more money yet.

Andrew Johnston is a film critic and associate editor at US WEEKLY magazine.