Religulous, Bill Maher and Larry Charles' tongue-in-cheek quest to understand the faiths of the world while mocking them, opened strongly last week, taking in $3,428,633 at the box office, according to the indieWIRE BOT
The Lionsgate release also finished among last week's top ten grossersof any genre, and is the sixth documentary to top the hallowed seven-digit mark this year, joining Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ($7,690,544), Shine A Light ($5,371,629), Young @ Heart ($3,966,690), Man on Wire ($2,509,822) and Gonzo ($1,218,652), according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
Still hanging in there are Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World ($921,813), which opened at the beginning of the summer, and Yung Chang's Up the Yangtse ($799,061), another long-distance runner for Zeitgeist Films, which released the doc back in April. On the downside, Paramount Vantage must be licking its wounds with its last hurrah, American Teen, which the former arthouse division of Paramount bought for $2.5 million at Sundance and spent an additional sum for marketing and PR. But the film ended its run at $942,441, well before American teens were back in high school.