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15 years ago - January 12 & 19, 2001
Early January 2001 began with Cast Away leading the box office along with What Women Want and Traffic. Officially released in December, Thirteen Days added over 2,000 theaters for wide release on January 12th, landing the #4 spot with $9.7 million. Thirteen Days starred Kevin Costner as advisor to President Kennedy (played by Bruce Greenwood) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film earned $66 million during its run, but that was against a budget of $80 million and it failed to produce any Oscar nominations.

Save the Last Dance
This high school drama starred Julia Stiles as a white teenager who hopes to go to Juilliard to study ballet, but gives up dancing after her mother dies. Transferring to an urban Chicago high school, she develops a relationship with a black classmate played by Sean Patrick Thomas, and they deal with issues of race and class. Eventually she combines hip-hop dancing with ballet to impress the Julliard admitting faculty. Stiles had earned Breakthrough Role nominations by the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Awards the previous year for 10 Things I Hate About You, and this film may have been primed by the December release of its soundtrack, which rose to #3 on the Billboard charts and achieved platinum sales at the end of January.

Reviews were mixed, but teen audiences made this film a hit. Save the Last Dance opened at #1 with $23 million from 2,230 theaters over three days and $27.5 million for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, smashing the January opening weekend record set by She’s All That two years earlier (Star Wars earned $35.9 million as a Special Edition re-release in January 1997). The MTV-produced film earned a win in the Best Onscreen Kiss category at the MTV Movie Awards and won Teen Choice Awards for Stiles and co-star Kerry Washington. Eventually the film earned $91 million in U.S. theaters, a career best for director Thomas Carter.

The Pledge
The only new premiere for the weekend of January 19th was this crime drama about a police chief on his last case, driven to find a child-murderer. Jack Nicholson starred as the police chief, with Aaron Eckhart, Patricia Clarkson, Benicio del Toro, Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, and Vanessa Redgrave co-starring. The film was Sean Penn’s third project as director, and it earned him a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes. Reviews were good, but they didn’t help the film’s box office. The Pledge opened at #11 with $5.7 million from 1,275 theaters and eventually grossed $19.7 million.

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