Sony Pictures

The box office competition finally overwhelmed "The Hunger Games" as the romantic comedy "Think Like a Man" beat expectations with a chart-topping $33.0 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales over the weekend.

Love story "The Lucky One" also exceeded forecasts to finish second with $22.8 million from Friday through Sunday, according to studio estimates. The two films pushed the blockbuster "Hunger Games" to third, ending its four-week streak at No. 1.

"Think Like a Man" is based on comedian Steve Harvey's best-selling, non-fiction relationship guide "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man."

The movie follows four couples trying to work out various issues and stars Gabrielle Union, Kevin Hart, Michael Ealy, Romany Malco, hip-hop singer Chris Brown and Oscar-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson. Harvey was executive producer and has a small role playing himself.

Video: Watch the 'Think Like a Man' trailer

The film cost a modest $13 million to make, and received positive feedback in pre-release screenings, said Rory Bruer, president of worldwide distribution for Sony Corp's Sony Pictures studio.

"We definitely felt like we had a hit coming," Bruer said. Still, the weekend performance "exceeded everyone's expectations," he said.

Audiences gave "Think Like a Man" an "A" grade in polling by survey firm CinemaScore.

"The Lucky One" tells the story of a U.S. Marine who returns from his third tour of duty in Iraq, convinced that the one thing that kept him safe and alive was a photograph of a beautiful woman he found in the rubble of war.

It also was based on a book, a 2008 best-seller from well-known "Notebook" author Nicholas Sparks. The movie stars Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling and cost about $25 million to produce.

Efron's female fan base helped the movie beat forecasts. Fifty-seven percent of moviegoers polled said the actor was their top reason for seeing the film, said Jeff Goldstein, executive vice president of domestic distribution for Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros. studio.

"The Lucky One" added $3.8 million from nine international markets, bringing its global debut to $26.6 million.

"Hunger Games," the smash hit about an oppressive society's televised teen death match, took in an estimated $14.5 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters during the weekend. Global sales for the film from Lions Gate Entertainment Corp reached $572.7 million since its release.

The weekend's other new movie, nature documentary "Chimpanzee," finished in fourth place with $10.2 million. It scored the highest opening among four films released by Walt Disney Co's Disneynature film unit, which makes wildlife movies and supports conservation efforts.

Comedy "The Three Stooges," from News Corp's 20th Century Fox studio, finished fifth with $9.2 million.

Also this weekend, action movie "Battleship" pulled in $58.4 million during its second weekend in international markets and brought its total to $129.6 million. The movie from Comcast Corp's Universal Pictures opens in the United States and Canada on May 18.

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Warner Bros.

Taylor Schilling and Zac Efron in "The Lucky One"

REVIEW: Maybe you can't fool all the people all the time, but novelist Nicholas Sparks sure has a lot of them hoodwinked with his run of drearily predictable stories of love and fate. Producer Denise Di Novi has enjoyed similar success with big-screen adaptations of the writer's work and the commercial winning streak will likely continue in moderate fashion with their fourth joint outing, the stubbornly soggy "The Lucky One." The main point of interest here is that Zac Efron, perhaps concerned that he wasn't getting parts that were going to Channing Tatum and Taylor Lautner, has seriously bulked up to play a somber Marine vet who returns home from the Middle East to find love at a dog kennel.

Embalming the simple and simplistic yarn in an amber glow that is all but suffocating and banishing from it any traces of humor and spontaneity, director Scott Hicks (can it have been 16 years since "Shine"?) serves up this treacly tale with absolutely no trace of self-consciousness about the material's cliches or simple-mindedness; perhaps that's as it must be, so that it may play for the intended audience. But nearly every scene is presented in a manner so as to maximize its clunkiness and conventionality, with the visual coverage thuddingly apparent in the far-too-frequent cutting among the many perspectives from which any given sequence has been shot. There's no dramatic or visual scheme here, just random camera angles tossed and mixed.

Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling step out for 'Lucky One' premiere

In a war zone no bigger than a corner of a studio back lot, Efron's Sgt. Logan Thibault survives a firefight in which others near him are killed. On the ground he later finds a photograph of a pretty young woman bearing the inscription “Keep Safe” and, once back home, resolves to track her down, whoever and wherever she is.

With scant evidence, he finds Beth (Taylor Schilling) in rural Louisiana, running a kennel and living in a spacious and charming old home with her seven-year-old son Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart) and grandma Ellie (Blythe Danner), who hires the serious young man despite Beth's uneasiness; the man who'd been carrying her photograph was her brother. Still, with wise old Ellie gently pulling and pushing, it's obvious Beth will soon thaw to the good soldier's charms.

Not only that, but little Ben is in obvious need of a positive father figure, his real one, the local deputy Sheriff Keith Clayton (Jay R. Ferguson), being a good ol' a-hole of the first order. Whereas Logan can do everything from accompanying Ben on piano at the boy's upcoming church violin recital to deliberately losing at chess to bolster the lad's confidence, swaggering Keith mockingly whistles the "Marines' Hymn" at the soldier and uses his lawman position to threaten both his ex-wife and Logan.

Still, if it weren't for the threat posed by the sheriff, which is so broadly drawn it would have been right at home in a silent movie melodrama, the film would possess no dramatic tension at all, so bland and preordained is the progress of the central relationship. It's all conducted in the most gradual, decorous and unsurprising manner, with Logan patiently biding his time until Beth is good and ready for the inevitable. What happens to Keith is positively Biblical, which reflects the fact that, while not specifically evangelical or pointedly religious, Sparks' stories reflect a distinctly old-fashioned morality and mindset that clearly speak to a certain portion of the public but will seem like unshucked corn to others.

Despite their inner turmoil, the characters remain bland and superficial, never expressing gut feelings when homilies about destiny and life's little surprises will do. Efron works within such a narrow range of stoical solidity that his real potential is impossible to gauge, while Schilling, who was the one somewhat good thing about last year's "Atlas Shrugged, Part 1" (a film conspicuously missing from her Warner Bros. presskit bio) seems constrained as if by contagion. It's always gorgeous and burnished gold in the Louisiana on view here, never sticky and sweaty, and none of the 20-odd bland pop songs that accompany Mark Isham's score evoke the slightest feel for the story's setting.

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