But critics were unimpressed, and action fans had only a passing interest in the movie, which featured relative unknown Benjamin Walker as Lincoln.

president waging his own civil war against the blood-suckers of the republic. The R-rated “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” was a clever idea - the 16th U.S. Two-thirds of the film’s business came from families, who also continued to flock to “Madagascar 3,” making a rare weekend when two PG-rated movies led the box office. The audience for “Brave” did lean toward females, who accounted for 57 percent of viewers. “It is a phenomenal thing, these guys and their mastery of big storytelling and character development, delivering something that plays well to adults as well as kids, to girls as well as boys,” Dave Hollis, Disney’s head of distribution, said of Pixar. “Brave” matched the $66.1 million debut of Pixar’s “Cars 2,” with male automotive lead Lightning McQueen, over the same weekend a year ago. The film proved that audiences will turn up for a female hero, not just the male protagonists of past Pixar flicks, such as Woody and Buzz of “Toy Story,” the robot of “WALL-E” or the rat and his chef buddy of “Ratatouille.” “Brave” features a voice cast led by Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson in a mother-daughter story of a young Scottish princess defying tradition that requires her to marry against her will.

That gave the Sony Pictures Classics release a whopping average of $75,874 a theater, compared to $16,028 in 4,164 cinemas for “Brave.”

Woody Allen’s Italian romance “To Rome with Love” pulled in huge audiences in limited release, debuting with $379,371 in five theaters. The Focus Features film, playing in much narrower release than other top-10 movies, stars Carell and Knightley as heartbroken neighbors on a road trip as a killer asteroid hurtles toward Earth.

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