Holy Cow! ‘Home 2’ Hauls in Box-Office Moola : Movies: Sequel starts off with a bang, opening with seventh-biggest weekend. ‘Dracula’ continues strong; ‘X’ is third.

“My suggestion to theater operators is to stock more popcorn,” said an enthusiastic Tom Sherak, executive vice president of 20th Century Fox, Sunday as he reviewed the huge, $32-million box-office statistics for “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”

As the film’s star Macaulay Culkin might say: “Holy cow!”

Based on preliminary figures, it was shaping up as a weekend of box-office records.

Less than a week after Francis Ford Coppola’s extravagant production of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” debuted with the seventh-biggest opening weekend ever recorded, “Home Alone 2” surpassed that mark by $2 million. If the estimates hold, the film could even take over sixth place, bumping “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” which had a $31-million opening on the July 4 holiday weekend in 1991.

“Dracula” continued strong for a second weekend, although far below its debut figures, while Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” took third place, bringing joy to Warner Bros.

The box office take for “Dracula” was an estimated $15.5 million, for a whopping 10-day total of $54 million, according to distributor Columbia Pictures.

“Malcolm X” was headed for a weekend gross of $10.5 million. Warner Bros. President of Domestic Distribution Barry Reardon said that about doubled the opening weekend of the studio’s “JFK” last year, which opened in a similar number of theaters.

Reardon said it was the first time that he could recall a non-holiday weekend with three films earning more than $10 million each.

The showing by “Home Alone 2” was all the more impressive since lower-priced children’s tickets were a major factor in the totals. The movie, which drew generally unfavorable reviews, was said by critics to be nearly a carbon copy of the original “Home Alone,” except that the locale was changed from the Midwest to New York. Both were produced and written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus.

“Dracula’s” nearly 50% falloff in grosses from the first weekend was not unexpected within industry circles, as it would have been virtually unprecedented for any film to sustain the level that “Dracula” attained when it opened Nov. 13. As the week played out, “Dracula” also encountered competition from the Wednesday opening of the long-awaited political biography “Malcolm X” and, of course, “Home Alone 2.”

Industry estimates placed the Wednesday-through-Sunday total for “Malcolm X” at an impressive $14.2 million, with $10.5 of that coming on the weekend. With its 3-hour and 20-minute running time, the number of showings per day for the Warner Bros. release is limited; thus the length becomes a drag on the potential gross.

The opening of “Malcolm X,” about the slain African-American civil rights activist, had produced speculation among theater operators and in the media about a potential for violence. However, those concerns virtually evaporated as initial viewers commented on the film’s serious and nonviolent message. As of Sunday there were no reports of any significant incidents.

The weekend at the box office was the second in a row to produce hefty numbers. One industry source estimated that, overall, business was about 20% higher than it was for the same weekend a year ago. Others suggested that when final numbers are tallied, the weekend might be a record for a non-holiday and non-summer period.

All these statistics mean that the film industry heads into the long and usually strong Thanksgiving Day holiday weekend with high hopes to attract massive audiences.

The prospect is underscored by the fact that the Walt Disney Studios’ “Aladdin,” another potential family appeal blockbuster, opens in nationwide release Wednesday. Since Nov. 11, the animated musical has been playing only in Los Angeles and New York and was given two previews on a double bill with Disney’s current hit “The Mighty Ducks.” The holiday weekend also will be boosted by “The Bodyguard,” starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston.

In the meantime, it was Fox’s turn to bask in the box-office limelight with “Home Alone 2,” knowing, like the folks at Columbia with “Dracula,” how quickly things can change in Hollywood.

The studio released the first “Home Alone” on Nov. 16., 1990, and the film had an unusually large opening for a non-sequel family comedy without any major stars. In its first three days, it grossed $17.1 million and then went on to hit $285 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales--the third highest-grossing movie ever.

Culkin became a virtual overnight kid star, based on his screaming and scheming against two would-be thieves, played in slapstick style by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, who repeat their roles in the sequel. And newly installed Fox studio chief Joe Roth emerged with a monster hit on his hands. Ironically, as the $40 million-budgeted sequel was about to open, Roth earlier this month announced plans to leave Fox to start his own production company at Walt Disney.

On Sunday, Sherak noted that the sequel almost doubled the gross of the first in the opening weekend. “Even though we are playing in nearly twice the number of screens (2,222), the per-screen average (about $14,000) remains about the same as it did in 1990,” he said.

With “Home Alone 2,” “Dracula” and “Malcolm X” in the top three positions, Warner Bros.’ release of “Passenger 57,” starring Wesley Snipes,” came in fourth with $4.5 million, and Columbia’s release of Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It” was fifth with about $3 million.