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Los Angeles - Super 8 easily claimed the top spot at the weekend box office in North America, despite concerns about the secretive marketing campaign for the sci-fi mystery with a no-name cast.
According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, the Paramount Pictures release earned about $37m during its first three days of release, exceeding the studio's low-ball forecast in the $25m to $30m range.
The film earned an additional $1m through a Twitter-related round of sneak previews on Thursday.
Old-fashioned mystery
In a summer of sequels and superheroes, Super 8 is the first original, live-action non-sequel to take the No 1 slot in almost three months. The thriller Limitless led the field during the weekend of March 18-20.
Last weekend's champion, X-Men: First Class, the fifth entry in the Marvel comic book series, slipped to No 2 with $25m. It was followed by The Hangover Part II with $18.5 million in its third weekend.
The only other new entry in the top 10 bombed. The kids movie Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer opened at No 7 with just $6.3m, coming in at the low end of expectations in the $6m to $10m range.
The advance buzz for Super 8 was hardly deafening, even with the A-list imprimatur of J.J. Abrams as writer/director and Steven Spielberg as a producer. Abrams convinced skeptical Paramount executives to run a campaign that retained a sense of old-fashioned mystery, earning scorn from industry pundits as surveys showed little enthusiasm among prospective moviegoers.
The plot centres on a group of kids in a small Ohio town who spend the summer of 1979 making a home movie using the 8mm film format that was popular back then and from which the film gets its title. They witness a train crash, which triggers a series of inexplicable events and disappearances. The trailer deliberately did not show the alien creature around which the film revolves.
As industry pundits began to second-guess the strategy, Paramount last week announced the film would open a day ahead of schedule on Thursday in a sneak-preview promotion with Twitter. A glimpse of the creature was also sent online.
The last-minute fix, along with overwhelmingly positive reviews, seemed to do the trick. The film cost a relatively modest $50m to make, according to Paramount.
Elsewhere, Judy Moody is the latest in a string of underperforming literary adaptations aimed at young girls, including last summer's Beverly Cleary adaptation Ramona and Beezus and a 2007 adaptation of the Nancy Drew books.
It was financed for nearly $20m by Sarah Siegel-Magness and her husband Gary Magness, the couple who previously backed the Oscar-winning movie Precious.
