Stars-on-ice Will Ferrell and Jon Heder took the box office gold for the weekend.
Paramount and DreamWorks’ “Blades of Glory,” with Ferrell and Heder playing figure-skating rivals who become the sport’s first men’s pair, debuted as the No. 1 movie with $33 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Disney’s animated adventure “Meet the Robinsons,” about the time-traveling journey of a brilliant but lonely orphan, debuted in second place with $25.1 million.
The previous weekend’s top movie — the Warner Bros. animated tale “TMNT,” a revival of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” franchise — slipped to fourth place with $9.2 million, down a steep 62 percent from its $24.3 million debut. “TMNT” raised its 10-day total to $38.4 million.
“This is still a good weekend, a pretty healthy one-two punch with ‘Blades of Glory’ and ‘Meet the Robinsons’ at the top,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers.
Movie attendance is up 4 percent so far this year, Dergarabedian said.
Teaming with “Napoleon Dynamite” star Heder on “Blades of Glory,” Ferrell scored the second-best opening of his career, behind last summer’s “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” which took in $47 million in its first weekend.
“It starts with a great concept, and the whole picture was cast so well,” said DreamWorks spokesman Marvin Levy. “Another part of the surprise was, we got a ton of very, very good reviews.”
“Meet the Robinsons” played in about 3,400 theaters and did especially well in a 3-D version at 600 cinemas, said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney. The studio did not have a precise breakdown, but cinemas reported that screens playing the 3-D version pulled in about double the grosses of theaters running the regular 2-D version, Viane said.