‘Flightplan’ charts course to the top

Jodie Foster’s mother-in-distress elbowed ahead of an animated bride-in-limbo, with “Flightplan” taking in $24.6 million in weekend ticket sales and “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” tallying $20.1 million, according to studio estimates released Sunday.

Although the overall box office continues to lag behind 2004, the weekend showed continuing signs of improvement. The two films propelled box office to a fourth consecutive weekend that beat the same three-day periods last year, according to box office tracking firm Nielsen EDI. And that was despite theaters in the significant market of Houston being largely missing in action because of Hurricane Rita.

If estimates hold up when more reliable figures become available today, it will mark the first time more than two films have grossed more than $20 million in their initial weekends of wide release during the month of September -- ordinarily a slow month for moviegoing. “Flightplan” and “Corpse Bride” will be the third and fourth such films this month, after “Transporter 2” and “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.”

“Flightplan” moviegoers were split 51% to 49%, female to male, and Disney said exit surveys indicated the Imagine Films production appealed to a broad age group, with 70% of its ticket buyers between ages 18 and 49. In the film directed by Robert Schwentke, Foster plays a mother whose young daughter vanishes during a transatlantic flight, with the crew having no record that the girl even boarded the jet. The movie was playing in 3,424 theaters.

“Corpse Bride,” Burton’s stop-motion animation adventure about a flesh-and-blood groom-to-be who inadvertently conjures a different mate from the land of the dead, ballooned from five theaters in its initial weekend of limited release to 3,204, with Warner Bros. reporting audiences made up of families with children and adults 25 and under, about evenly split between males and females.

Among other new releases, “Roll Bounce,” about a skating showdown between two groups of kids, opened in fourth place with about $8 million in 1,625 theaters, Fox Searchlight reported.

Films debuting in limited release were led by “A History of Violence,” which took in $504,000 in 14 theaters for a healthy per-venue average of $36,000, New Line reported. The movie, which stars Viggo Mortensen as a small-town hero who attracts the attention of the Philadelphia mob, rolls out to 1,200 additional theaters on Friday. Roman Polanski’s “Oliver Twist” arrived in five theaters spread among Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, with about $69,000 for an average of $13,727. Sony/TriStar said it will expand the film to about 800 theaters Friday.

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Box Office

Preliminary results (in millions) based on studio projections.

*--* Movie 3-day gross Total Flightplan $24.6 $24.6

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride 20.1 20.6

Just Like Heaven 9.8 30.0

Roll Bounce 8.0 8.0

The Exorcism of Emily Rose 7.5 62.3

Lord of War 4.9 17.2

The 40 Year-Old Virgin 4.3 96.9

The Constant Gardener 2.2 27.6

Transporter 2 2.2 39.8

Cry Wolf 2.1 7.4

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Source: Nielsen EDI Inc.

Los Angeles Times