Kick it up a notch: ‘Kick-Ass’ squeaks by ‘Dragon’ to No. 1 at box office in final count

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‘Kick-Ass’ may not have quite lived up to its name, but it did end up with a win.

As final counting in the closest box office race of the year wrapped up this morning, Lionsgate’s over-the-top superhero movie ‘Kick Ass’ landed in first place with a razor thin victory over DreamWorks Animation’s ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’

After all ticket sales for Sunday were calculated, ‘Kick-Ass’ distributor Lionsgate reported that its movie grossed $19.8 million in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, up just slightly from the studio’s estimate Sunday of $19.75 million.

‘Dragon’ distributor Paramount Pictures, meanwhile, revised its weekend estimate down from $20 million to $19.63 million, moving the strongly performing animated film from first place to second on its fourth weekend.

Such minor revisions of Sunday-morning box-office estimates on Monday are not unusual. It is rare for the order of the top two movies to switch, but it also happened last week when ‘Date Night’ ended up in second place after Fox initially estimated it had beat ‘Clash of the Titans.’

Lionsgate executives, no doubt, were as annoyed this morning as Warner Bros. executives were last week to see their first-place movie reported as No. 2 in Sunday’s box-office coverage.

-- Ben Fritz

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