The Lion King Edges Brad Pitt's A's and the Dolphins Too

In the 2002 baseball season, the underdog Oakland As ran off a string of 20 wins to snag the American League West pennant, then were defeated in the first round of the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins, three games to two. In the late-September 2011 box-office derby, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Oakland General Manager Billy Beane, streaked to the top spot on Friday only to lose the weekend to the defending champion, The Lion King, when the family audience stormed the plexes on Saturday. And theres a slim chance that another movie for kids, the true-life, live-action Dolphin Tale, could overtake Moneyball for second place.

Wait a dolphin with an injured tail beating the Hollywood rajah Pitt? Why, that would be akin to the Tampa Bay Rays, nine games behind in the wild card race three weekends ago, coming from behind to knock the Boston Red Sox out of this years playoffs. Before they played Sunday, the Rays had closed to within a game and a half of the currently stinking Sox.

According to early studio estimates, Disneys 3-D re-release of The Lion King will win the weekend box-office race at North American theaters with $22.1 million, a slim 27% drop from last weekend. Moneyball is pegged to take in $20.6 million. And Dolphin Tale, says its distributor, Warner Bros., will end up with Fri.-Sun. earnings of $20.26 million. Note that only $340,000 separates the estimated grosses of the Pitt picture and the dolphin drama. Thats not a lot of money to make up, depending on how many kids and their moms take in an all-wet inspirational animal movie think The Blind Side with a sea mammal instead of a homeless black kid while Dad sits at home switching channels between the last Sunday of ba! seballs regular season and NFL week three.

To explain how this could happen, we need to apply sabermetrics the math theories applied to baseball stats by the great Kansas guru Bill James, and adapted by the Beane team to spur the As to their surprising 2002 season to Hollywood movies. First, know that the weekend grosses that the studios issue on Sunday morning are based on hard figures of box-office revenue from Friday, soft ones from Saturday and, for Sunday, pure guesswork: a mix of numbers from similar films in the past, some field reports and possible consultations with a Ouija board. The final weekend grosses, released Monday and using actual dollar amounts, often vary by millions from the Sunday predictions. We wont know the outcome of this weekends top three finishers until tomorrow afternoon.

[MONDAY UPDATE: In the final figures, The Lion King was still No. 1, with $21.9 million, about $200,000 below expectations. The studio execs for both Moneyball and Dolphin Tale severely overestimated their films' Sunday earnings; in each case, the actual weekend gross was about $1.2 million less than predicted. Moneyball finished in second place with $19.5 million, Dolphin Talein third with $19.15 million. In more meaningful Monday action, the Tampa Bay Rays tied the Boston Red Sox in the American League wild-card race with two games to play. Now that's funnyball [EM] unless youre a citizen of Red Sox Nation.]

Second, understand that different kind of movies attract different audiences on different days. Pictures aimed at guys tend to score big on Fridays, while those for kids do their best business on Saturdays, when parents treat their young to an afternoon at the mall, G- or PG-rated movie included. Family films also do well on Sundays.

This weekends top three entries seem to have held true to form. Moneyball won Friday with $6.7 million, over The Lion Kings $6.05 million and Dolphin Tales $5.2 mill! ion. Yes terday, the baseball film increased its take by a healthy 24%, to $8.4 million; but Lion King was up 52%, to $9.2 million, taking the two-day lead over Moneyball by $260,000 and Dolphin Tales audience jumped an aquamazing 70% to $8.66 million. The studios guesstimates for todays box office are $6.9 million for Simba, $6.5 million for Shamu and just $5.5 million for Baseball Brad.

When this nuclear cloud of math disperses, a few things become clear. Kids and older people, the demographics that drove the box office in the first part of 2011, are back in force in autumn: the box office was up 21% from the same weekend last year. Another point is that The Lion Kings win last weekend wasnt a one-frame wonder. Its the first rerelease since George Lucass The Empire Strikes Back in 1997 to have won consecutive weekends; and its success provides a wildly profitable promo for the Lion King Blu-ray edition, due in stores Oct. 4. In fact, the loot from this theatrical run is mere gravy or gazelle carcass for the Disney pride.

What should not be obscured is Moneyballs excellent opening. That $20.6 million is the top number ever for a baseball movie (in inflated dollars). Moreover, the CinemaScore polling of moviegoers who saw the picture on its opening day suggests that people like the movie: in keeping with its subject, the film scored straight As from men and women, kids and adults. Thing is, not many kids went, they being preoccupied with lions and dolphins. An executive from a rival studio told Deadline Hollywoods Nikki Finke that almost 60% of the Moneyball audience was over 50; that puts the movie in the Julie & Julia geriatrics sweepstakes. And well bet that Pitt, who as producer was Moneyballs guiding light and general manager, is like Billy Beane in thinking that theres no honor in running a good race but finishing second or third. As he says in the film, I hate to lose even more than I want to win.

He m ight be especially vexed to lose to Harry Connick, Jr., a fellow New Orleans resident (Pitt and Angelina Jolie made a home there while helping the locals revive from their Hurricane Katrina disaster). Dolphin Tale, starring Connick as a friendly doctor who treats the ailing bottlenoses tail, pulled a soaring A-plus from CinemaScore pollees. It also proved that kid movies are killers here and abroad: this weekend The Smurfs continued its scorched-multiplex policy in foreign countries, crossing the half-billion-dollar mark worldwide.

In other new releases, the teen Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner starred in (and produced) his own drama, Abduction, directed by one-time prodigy John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood). This Hitchcockish thriller, about an angry young man on the run when he discovers his true identity, earned a less-than-buff $11.2 million. And Killer Elite the second movie in two weekends to take its title from a 1970s Sam Peckinpah melodrama, after last weeks Straw Dogs parlayed the grizzled tough-guy star quality of Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert De Niro into a fifth-place finish and a modest $9.5 million. In baseball terms or Hollywood dollars, both films finished out of the money.

Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekends top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1.The Lion King, $22.1 million; $61.7 million, second week of rerelease

2.Moneyball, $20.6 million, first weekend

3.Dolphin Tale, $20.3 million, first weekend

4.Abduction, $11.2 million, first weekend

5.Killer Elite, $9.5 million, first weekend

6.Contagion, $8.6 million; $57.1 million, third week

7.Drive, $5.8 million; $21.4 million, second week

8.The Help, $4.4 million; $154.4 million, seventh week

9.Straw Dogs, $2.1 million; $8.9 million, second week

10.I Dont Know How ! She Does It, $2.05 million; $8 million, second week