As many predicted yesterday, Moneyball’s thin box office lead Friday did not pan out. Dolphin Tale pushed ahead to take the weekend’s top spot with a respectable $14.3 million take, compared to the baseball flick’s $12.2 million. (Thankfully for Moneyball, box office gold doesn’t always translate into Oscar gold.) The much-talked-about opener this week, Will Reiser’s cancer comedy 50/50 — starring Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — came in a sad fourth. (Lion King 3-D, which is wrapping up its short release, took third.) Deadline’s Nikke Finke blames the meager $9 million opening weekend on a too-wide release, explaining the days of platform releases are over, what with “the skyrocketing costs of marketing.” Further down the list were two more newbies: Sony’s Courageous, about cop fathers, and Jim Robinson’s poorly promoted horror feature Dream House. As for Taylor Lautner’s Abduction, its ticket sales were down 47 percent from last weekend — not exactly the breakout that the typecast actor was looking for. [Deadline]
