Green Hornet leaps to US box office top spot

LOS ANGELES: Superhero movie "The Green Hornet" leaped to the top of the North American box office in its debut weekend, preliminary estimates showed Sunday, thrilling audiences with special effects but leaving some critics cold. The Michel Gondry flick, starring stoner favorite Seth Rogan, took in $34 million with its tale of a young playboy businessman who becomes an butt-kicking crime fighter, according to industry tracker Exhibitor Relations. Reviewers however panned the project as lackluster, despite a star cast featuring Cameron Diaz and Christoph Waltz, the Austrian actor of "Inglourious Basterds" fame. Also in its opening weekend was Vince Vaughn's relationship comedy "The Dilemma," which took in $17 million at the box office. Last week's top movie, Oscar-winning brothers Joel and Ethan Coen's remake of John Wayne western "True Grit," starring Jeff Bridges as the drunken, hard-nosed US marshal, slid to the third spot with an $11-million profit. After a week of positive buzz, British historical drama "The King's Speech," featuring Colin Firth as a stuttering King George VI, soared from last week's ninth place to fourth, with $9 million in receipts. The inspired ballet-themed pyschological thriller "Black Swan," starring Natalie Portman as a dancer in a New York company exploring the dark sides of the industry and her own sensuality, stood strong at fifth place with $8.1 million, for a seven-week $72.9-million total. "Little Fockers," the third installment of the Robert De Niro-Ben Stiller comedies about nightmare in-laws, meanwhile fell to sixth place from last week's number two with $7.1 million. The epic 3-D sequel to the 1982 sci-fi cult "TRON: Legacy," also starring Jeff Bridges and his computer-generated version of his younger self from the original movie, dropped three places to seventh with $5.6 million, for a five-week total of $156.9 million. The also 3-D and partly computer animated family film "Yogi Bear" was in eighth with $5.3 million while Mark Wahlberg's boxing drama "The Fighter" fell two places to ninth with $5.1 million, "Season of the Witch," starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman as witch-escorting knights in Black Plague Europe, rounded out the top ten after a dramatic fall from third place, with $4.5 million.