Brother Ethan put it this way: "There's a little niche market of people who go to our movies no matter what, and that's worth like $7- to $10 million. Obviously, this movie appeals to people who don't know who we are, or care."
"True Grit" is pushing $160 million - that's already more than double their next biggest hit, "No Country for Old Men," and is a total roomy enough to accommodate 10 "Big Lebowski"s or 30 "Miller's Crossing"s.
It's not really the total that's staggering - $150 million is an opening weekend for "Transformers" producer Michael Bay - it's the way "True Grit" is piling up the dough, with a performance that defeats all known algorithms for tracking ticket sales.
Over the final January weekend, for example, the movie's sixth week in release, the movie's nationwide run dropped by 330 theaters as new product moved into the market.
But its box-office take increased relative to the previous week, by 2.5 percent, another $7 million, an unheard-of feat for a movie that opened wide and has been sitting in theaters for a month and a half. (Movies that drop less than 40 percent week to week are considered respectable. Phenoms like "Titanic" and "The Sixth Sense" ebbed at roughly 20 percent.)
The Coens are stunned, even though Ethan, as he edited the picture, suspected that they were crafting a "crossover" movie.
"We perceived this movie as a piece of entertainment," he said. "We wanted it to work that way for the audience. When we finished, we put it out there and thought, 'This might cross over.' For us, that meant doing the kind of business that 'No Country for Old Men' did. What's happening now, this did not seem to be in the realm of possibility."
