FAIR GAME, 127 HOURS OPEN STRONG

Opening in limited release, Doug Liman’s Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, performed reasonably well, averaging about $15,200 in each of the 46 theaters where it was screened. The political drama, which made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival last May, is being rolled out cautiously by the studio, in the hope that word-of-mouth will allow it to give the movie a wide release. But the surprise hit of the weekend was Fox Searchlight’s 127 Hours, the intense film starring James Franco about hiker Aron Ralston, who was forced to amputate his own arm in order to free himself from a boulder that landed on it when he fell into a canyon in Utah. Although the studio was worried about reports of preview audience members fainting and leaving the theater during the graphic scenes of the amputation, the film ended up earning an average of $66,481 in each of the four theaters where it was shown this weekend for a total of $265,925. Fox Searchlight plans to go wide with the film on Dec. 3.