Now with fluoridated Add On.
As summer begins, domestic box office continues to percolate right along.
Up descends a mere 37% Friday to Friday, but that small decline is enough to allow the well-reviewed road comedy The Hangover to take Friday's top prize ...
Warner Bros. comedy "The Hangover" had the upper hand over a string of family and teen demo comedies at the Friday box office, grossing an eye-opening $16.54 million; the second-best first day for an R-rated comedy...
Disney-Pixar's animated 3-D toon "Up" also had an upbeat second Friday ... with an estimated $13.1 million. Through eight days, the domestic cume for the Ed Asner voiced pic stands at $106.2 million; just slightly ahead of the running B.O. of last summer's "Wall-E" which made $103.7 million in its first eight days.
The question, of course, is how the latest Pixarian epic holds on weekend to weekend. Using the Koch Box Office Calculator, my guesstimate is that it will end its domestic run with a 4+ multiplier of its initial weekend, which would land it north of $250 million. Time will tell if I'm accurate or optimistic.
Meanwhile, Monsters Vs. Aliens is up around the $195 million domestic marker, and unlikely to go a whole lot higher ...
Add On: After the weekend dust settles, Up again lands at #1, losing to The Hangover on a per-screen average (though not by much), but winning the Big Enchilada with $44.2 million and a small 35% decline.
Warner Bros.' R-rated comedy "The Hangover" grossed a boffo $43.3 million in its debut, although Disney-Pixar holdover "Up" remained No. 1 at the domestic box office at $44.2 million.
Weekend also brought the summer's first B.O. clunker, Universal's big-budget laffer "Land of the Lost." The Will Ferrell starrer grossed $19.5 million from 3,521 theaters, well below the $30 million the studio had hoped for.
Heading into the weekend, Todd Phillips' "Hangover" was projected to open in the low to mid-$20s. Film's ability to roar past those projections and come close to beating "Up" underscores the healthy appetite for comedies.
Well, except for comedies like Land of the Lost. Apparently when you create a fully ripe stinker, even Will Ferrell can't save it.
Monsters Vs. Aliens, now perching on #16, will end up about $5 million south of a $200 million domestic gross when all is said and done.
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4 comments:
A 37% drop in the second weekend is exceedingly good. 'Up' definitely has legs, and is obviously getting very good word of mouth. Usually, summer movies drop 60-70% week-to-week.
I would suggest that this may mean that your estimate is a little low. 4X opening weekend = 272 million. And with good word of mouth, and repeat business, it just may exceed even that.
Amazing what can happen when you make an interesting movie about characters people actually care about.
Nikki F. said "Land Of The Lost needed to debut with at least $30M for the studio not to sweat"... As of Friday: $7.2 million!!! Terminator Salvation may have competition for biggest disappointment of the summer ...
Land of the Lost stinks...and is definitely NOT a family film.
Summer blockbusters tend to drop 40-50% week to week (not 60-70% unless they're really bad). Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda both made about 28% of their domestic take on the first weekend which projects to about $240-250 million. Ratatouille had a similar 35% drop over the opening weekend and the first weekend resulted in only 22.8% of its total domestic gross which would project to $300 million. However Ratatouille opened much lower which could have resulted in its lower week-to-week drops. So it looks like Up will make somewhere between $250-300 million domestically. I think it all depends on the strength of the summer's other movies (and other than Harry Potter I think they all look weak).
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