I’m a Matthew McConaughey fan. He’s been looking kind of gaunt and greasy lately, but I’ll overlook it. That’s why it makes me sad to learn that The Lincoln Lawyer tanked at the box office this weekend and came a full third to Bradley Cooper’s Limitless. Lincoln Lawyer is faring better on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 81% rating to Limitless‘ 65%. Still Limitless is about the American dream of high achievement in a pill, and it has DeNiro in it. It came in first but only pulled in $19 million. Not a lot of people went to the movies this weekend, and I know it was one of the first warm weekends we had so I wasn’t going to waste it indoors. Here’s more from Box Office Mojo:

Despite decent starts for Limitless, Paul and The Lincoln Lawyer, overall weekend business was off nine percent from the same period last year, when Alice in Wonderland, The Bounty Hunter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid led, and attendance was on the low end for the third weekend of March.

Limitless packed an estimated $19 million on approximately 3,200 screens at 2,756 locations. That trailed the opening weekends of recent thrillers Unknown ($21.9 million) and The Adjustment Bureau ($21.2 million). Among other comparable titles, it was close to Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ($19 million) but was behind 21 ($24.1 million) and The Social Network ($22.4 million) (Limitless copied the latter with its heavy usage of Kanye West’s “Power”). Not too shabby for Bradley Cooper’s first real star vehicle, though the movie was heavily-promoted, including three spots on Super Bowl Sunday (though Box Office Mojo readers voted it the worst Super Bowl ad). The marketing hammered out a simple message embodied by the movie’s tagline, “What if a pill could make you rich and powerful?” (though the brain enhancement aspect was glossed over), and this dovetailed with Cooper’s arrogant, partying persona from The Hangover and other movies. According to exit polling from distributor Relativity Media, which heralded its first respectable launch, Limitless’s audience was 52 percent female and 60 percent was aged 25 years and older.

The Lincoln Lawyer drew an estimated $13.4 million on around 3,000 screens at 2,707 locations, which was star Matthew McConaughey’s top-grossing start in a non-comedy-or-action movie since his breakout in A Time to Kill. That’s not saying much as Lincoln Lawyer was pretty average otherwise, faring a bit better than the nationwide debuts of Michael Clayton and Fracture, but it gets extra points considering the paucity of legal thrillers in recent years and how its television spots made it look nearly indistinguishable from similar T.V. fare. Those ads were incoherent and murky, largely failing to explain the movie’s basic premise to the uninitiated. Fortunately, Lincoln Lawyer had other things going for it, such as being based on a bestselling novel, and it received extra publicity from a $6 movie ticket deal through discount site Groupon.com. Nearly 190,000 tickets were sold through Groupon, and just under 40,000 were estimated to have been redeemed over the weekend, according to distributor Lionsgate. Lionsgate counted those tickets at full price in its reporting, but that only inflated the gross by less than $100,000. Publicity was the primary aim of the Groupon deal, and Lionsgate’s research showed that 89 percent of Groupon buyers would not have seen the movie otherwise. Lincoln Lawyer’s demographic breakdown was 63 percent female and 85 percent aged 25 years and older.

[From Box Office Mojo]

I didn’t realize the McConaughey has never fared that well at the box office, but it’s not like he’s been putting out great movies or has starred in an action series. I expected Lincoln Lawyer to do much better, since I saw the coupons on Groupon and the ads seemed to be everywhere online. Maybe now we know why McConaughey is always going around shirtless and bringing his adorable sons with him to the beach – the guy has to get some press. I still love him, though. CNN has a new interview with him (below) in which he said he loves to go around without a shirt and that his movie Surfer Dude (2008) had his ideal wardrobe for that reason. He also explained that he went to law school but decided he didn’t want to wait until he was 28 to get out into the world. I’m sure the high workload and brainpower required had nothing to do with it. Instead he went to film production school and the rest is history.

Does this mean that Bradley Cooper is a big star now? It’s pretty telling that he made his split announcement on the day his movie came out, as Agent Bedhead pointed out. We’ll have to hear more about his love life whenever he takes another girlfriend. I heard Olivia Wilde is free and can use the publicity.

Here’s McConaughey’s CNN interview.

Limitless trailer:

Lincoln Lawyer trailer: