Box Office Archive for December, 2005

Weekend Estimates By Klady

4-Day Estimates / Weekend / % Change / Cume
King Kong / 30.8 / -58% / 118.2
The Chronicles of Narnia / 30.4 / -36% / 163.9
Fun With Dick and Jane / 23.2 / – / 30.7
Cheaper by the Dozen 2 / 14.6 / – / 19.8
Memoirs of a Geisha / 10.1 / 415% / 13.2
The Family Stone / 10.0 / -48% / 29.2
The Ringer / 8.2 / – / 8.2
Rumor Has It / 7.7 / – / 7.7
Wolf Creek / 6.1 / – / 6.1
Harry Potter & Goblet of Fire / 5.9 / -34% / 262.6

60 Comments »

Saturday Estimates by Mojo

Not a lot of change from Klady’s Friday numbers.
King Kong did finally hit $100 million on Day 11.
Brokeback Mountain tripled its screen count on Friday and, not surprisingly, stayed about even on the gross level.
According to these Saturday estimates, Christmas Eve day is up about 11% from last year, but it is much more spread out. Meet The Fockers did $7.2 million on the 24th last year. This year, Narnia/Kong did $9.7 million on top… and then there were five $1 million-plus films this year after the Top Two and only three last year after the Top One.
Through the 24th, measured by the daily Top Tens, December is up about 15% this year. And the last week of the year

76 Comments »

Friday Estimates

King Kong / Uni / 8.4 / 3576 / 95.7
Chronicles of Narnia / BV / 8.2 / 3853 / 141.3
Fun with Dick & Jane / Sony / 5.6 / 3045 / 13.1
Cheaper by the Dozen 2 / Fox / 3.9 / 3175 / 9.2
Memoirs of a Geisha / Sony / 2.7 / 1547 / 5.8
The Family Stone / Fox / 2.4 / 2469 / 21.6
The Ringer / Fox / 2.3 / 1829 / 2.3
Harry Potter & Gob Fire / WB / 1.6 / 2521 / 258.3
Munich / Uni / 1.4 / 532 / 1.4
Syriana / WB / 1.1 / 1724 / 26.7
Brokeback Mountain / Focus / 0.7 / 217 / 5.6
Also Debuting
Cache / SonyCla / 16.5 / 5 / –
The White Countess / SonyCla / 14.5 / 10 / –
Boy, do I not want to be the first to point this out… but King Kong will take longer to get to $100 million than The Hulk.
More eventually…

22 Comments »

Lion Beats Giant Monkey

Well… this is more unsettling…
Wednesday estimates from Mojo…
1. The Chronicles of Narnia – $4,940,386
2. King Kong – $4,870,320
The drama continues…

65 Comments »

Sunday Estimates – 12/18/05

Yeah

48 Comments »

Friday Estimates

Today is Dividing Day on King Kong.
Do you want to attack it and call it the 75th best Friday in history

58 Comments »

A Little Kong Perspective Please

King Kong had the ninth best Wednesday of all time in the month of December, sixteenth best outside of summer.
Five of the eight better Wednesday were Rings movies.
Meet The Fockers, released Christmas week last year, had a better Wed three days before X-mas and 4 days after.
Catch Me If You Can did slightly better than Kong did Wednesday on its Christmas Day release.
The non-December, non-summer betters? Harry Potters, Matrix III, The Passion,
I’m not saying that $10 million on Wed is thrilling. But get some perspective. THe Wednesday was better than any Wednesday by Spider-Man or Star Wars: Revenge of The Sith. They ended up doing ok.

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Kong Estimates A $9.8 Million Wed

Good, bad, or ugly?

65 Comments »

Friday Estimates

Not very interesting.
Aeon Flux, which looks to open between $11 million and $14 million without any critics screenings is right in range with other #2 films in the first weekend of December slot from the last number of years (Christmas With The Cranks, Honey, Analyze That). (Other outlets have highest estimates of Friday for the film.) If Paramount is okay with this number, this number is pretty dead on with what should have been expected. The irony is that Fox’s The Family Stone avoided this date as “bad for business” and will be very lucky to do the same number in a couple of weekends with a lot of great reviews to rely on and a cadre of stars almost as big as Charlize.
It’ll be interesting to see if Pride & Prejudice passes Rent in both daily and total numbers by the end of the weekend.
Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Zenda continues to stay ahead of the other three Potter films, but the daily take has fallen behind the rest and when the Narnia/Kong roadblock hits, I would guess that it will be hard for Goblet of Fire to pass up even the #2 in the series, much less reach the $318 million domestic of the first of the series.
Also, no one seems to be interested in reporting on the “re-release” of Cinderella Man, which started on November 18. The film started on 5 screens, but lost one and is now on 4. The film’s grossed about $33,000 in that time… a little bit better than the ongoing gross of Mr. & Mrs. Smith and not quite as good as Charlie & The Chocolate Factory in the same period.
Title / Distributor / Gross* / Theaters / % Change
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire / WB / 5.3 / 3858 / -77%
Aeon Flux / Par / 3.3 / 2608 / New
Walk The Line / Fox / 3.1 / 3160 / -58%
Yours, Mine And Ours / Par / 2.3 / 3210 / -67%
Just Friends / New Line / 2.1 / 2505 / -43%
Rent / Sony / 1.6 / 2437 / -62%
Pride And Prejudice / Focus / 1.4 / 1327 / -49%
Chicken Little / Bv / 1.1 / 3021 / -79%
Derailed / Wein Co / 0.75 / 1702 / -58%
In The Mix / Lions Gate / 0.6 / 1608 / -66%
Also Debuting
First Descent / Uni / 0.19 / 243 /
Transamerica / Weinstein Co / 12,700 / 2 /

19 Comments »

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon