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The Weinstein Company opened St. Vincent on a traditional platform and it appears to have reaped rewards from that old-school approach with a solid debut in a very crowded box office weekend for limited releases.

The film by Theodore Melfi grossed over $121K in four New York and L.A. theaters this weekend after opening the Hamptons International Film Festival Thursday. For the weekend, the Bill Murray comedy averaged more than $30K and boasts the weekend’s highest per-theater average. The film led a huge pack of new openers that included festival heavy-hitters such as Sundance winners Whiplash and documentary The Overnighters as well as the faith-centered Meet The Mormons and Christian Mingle The Movie.

TWC said that St. Vincent had a 67% jump from Friday to Saturday. TWC picked up the film in the script stage for a reported $13 million. Heading into the weekend, the company said it was capitalizing...

3Rd Update, Monday, 3:25Pm Pt: The majors — Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. — have updated their weekend estimates which are now reflected throughout the story. Some dips from what was originally reported yesterday among Sony and Paramount’s titles, but nothing too earth-shattering. While Gone Girl barely notched No. 1 with roughly $400K more than Annabelle stateside, $37.5M to $37.1M respectively; their spread at the overseas B.O. is wider in their weekend takes with the David Fincher film grabbing $24.5M and The Conjuring spinoff taking $20.7M for the weekend. However, Annabelle has a leg up on Gone Girl since it opened in Russia last weekend, hence the horror film’s total cume is $23.6M, $887K short of Gone Girl’s foreign take. Next weekend, the spooky doll film and the missing chick pic will pull each other’s hair in France and Spain where they bow against each other.

It.s hardly the ideal date movie but David Fincher.s lacerating portrait of a marriage gone sour drove ticket sales at Australian cinemas last weekend.

Starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike and based on Gillian Flynn.s best-selling novel, Gone Girl grabbed $4.7 million from Thursday to Sunday according to Rentrak.s estimates and $5 million with previews.

Pro-rata, that.s more potent than the Us 3-day bow of $US37.5 million, where the Fox film had to fight off a strong challenge from fellow debutante Annabelle.

The horror movie produced by James Wan, who directed the 2013 hit The Conjuring, fetched $US37.1 million in the Us, an unusually big opening for the genre, and a solid $1.9 million in Australia.

Here The Maze Runner continued to run hard, taking nearly $2 million in its third weekend (off 34%), propelling its takings to $12.8 million.

Despite mostly withering reviews, Dracula Untold, the origin story of the man who became Dracula,...

Ning Hao is comedy gold in China. His road-trip chuckle-fest Breakup Buddies just shot to the top of the international box office chart with a weekend take of $38 million in China, pushing the film's nine-day total to a whopping $93 million. A tale of a recently divorced man and his best friend who set off on a series of misadventures, Breakup Buddies reunites actors Xu Zheng and Huang Bo in their first movie together since megahit Lost in Thailand, which grossed nearly $200 million in China in 2012. Ning has done it before. His 2005 dramedy

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Chinese road-trip comedy Breakup Buddies shot to the top of the international box office chart with a weekend take of $38 million in China, pushing the film's nine-day total to a staggering $93 million, according to Rentrak. From director Ning Hao, Breakup Buddies follows a recently divorced man and his best friend who set off on a series of misadventures. It reteams actors Xu Zheng and Huang Bo in their first movie together since megahit Lost in Thailand, which grossed nearly $200 million in China in 2012. Read more Toronto: 'Breakup Buddies' Director on the Absurdity of Modern

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Foreign films and a doc scored well in the Specialty arena this weekend. That isn’t something I get to write very often but it’s a pleasure when it happens. China Lion‘s Breakup Buddies, Tribeca Film‘s music doc Nas: Time Is Illmatic and Bollywood heavyweight Bang Bang all pulled in solid numbers when they debuted this weekend among U.S. speciality films.

By contrast, the weekend’s most notable U.S. indie debut, Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children, took a dive in its first limited runs, while Radius-twc’s music documentary Keep On Keepin’ On again lived up to its name, gathering momentum in its third week.

That so-so start came even though Paramount seemingly did everything right for Men, Women & Children after a premiere at Toronto. The company created a marketing campaign that targeted both social networking-savvy young audiences and the traditional movie-going crowd. The...

Just by averting his eyes while muttering "Mr. Cock Boom," Chinese comedian Huang Bo justifies his status as a record-breaking mega-star in Breakup Buddies, a tone-deaf buddy comedy that's like 10 by way of Due Date. As Geng Hao, an embittered divorcee questing for rebound sex with help from boorish wingman Hao Yi (Xu Zheng), Huang (Lost in Thailand) makes a flimsy part engaging, even when he's using that obnoxious dating-website screen-name to get laid. Geng's story is only fitfully involving since his adventures in lady-killing are either crass or sappy. Geng at first tries and then decides not to bed a girl half his age, but only after Hao Yi baldly explains "the shadow effect," a trite self-help philosophy that serves as the film's thematic takeaway: "Now yo...

With China‘s National Day holiday officially kicking off Wednesday, the Middle Kingdom box office is poised for an extra boost thanks to today’s timely release of Breakup Buddies. The comedy is a sort of follow-up to smash hit Lost In Thailand. That film was key to a surge in local box office at the end of 2012 and made headlines around the globe. Breakup Buddies, which is particularly racy as far as Chinese movies go (check out the trailer above), has the added cachet of releasing in the U.S. later this week. China Lion picked up the film for North America and Australia/New Zealand ahead of its Toronto Film Festival premiere and will send it out in those markets at the end of this week. Im Global acquired the rights before Toronto and is handling it internationally.

The film stars Xu Zheng and Huang Bo and is...