Sunday Estimates by Klady – Aug 26

Friday Estimates by Klady – 8/25

Not a very exciting weekend at the box office.
Superbad is holding ok, considering the First-Friday-to-Second phenomenon. Sony can be as precious as they like with this weekend

Box Office Hell, Update – 8/24

EW and BO Prophets added….

Sunday Estimates by Klady – Aug 19

The stat is a little silly, but Superbad‘s opening is the 2nd best 3rd weekend of August opening ever… behind Freddy vs Jason. Of course, Superbad could be retitled, Seth vs Vag (pronounces vashhhh).
And reviews had dick all to do with it… as they never have anything to do with a wide opening weekend. The tracking was, simply, poorly read intentionally. Had the evidence that the movie was strong with teens been emphasized and the film come in under 20, the trackers would have been embarrassed for overlooking the precious overall numbers… the ones that everyone who isn’t reading the tracking in great detail obsess on and end up being gossiped about. Or, in other words, overestimating the film would have been more problematic with the trackers’ employers – the studios – than underestimating.
Once again… all this tracking reporting is fool’s gold. It does give you the lay of the land in rough terms. Knowing awareness is important. How it translates is actual numbers is often unknowable… which is why each studio, exec, producer, director, star, and others still hold their breath that first Friday. I wouldn’t mind people reporting tracking if the context was emphasized. But it is not. Just as Sunday numbers barely use the word “estimate” anymore and almost no one reports “finals,” media wants to “report” tracking as though it is a different fact than it is, I think because it makes them look like they know something and people forget all about the incorrect information of any individual when the story becomes the “surprise” opening.
The much bigger story than Superbad this weekend, in terms of tracking, is tracking being 40% higher than the estimate for The Invasion. Again… it had nothing to do with reviews. It was a complete marketing failure… a dump by the studio, which hated the picture and the production of the picture. (Note: Rumors of The Wachowskis shooting on the film are apparently incorrect… it was their First AD.)
So… we have two movies opening this weekend… one is off by 50% of the tracking estimate and one is off by 40% of the tracking estimate… in different directions. And next weekend, people will still be talking about the tracking as though it is going to tell us everything. If the studios expected tracking to predict box office, they would stop paying for it. But in spite of the problem

Friday Estimates by Klady – Super

Once again, people who don

Interesting Stat

In responding to a comment in another entry that was trying to make the case for agents – the unfortunate and self-serving source of most “news” in this town… as in “Both Limato and Morris CEO Jim Wiatt kept telling me this afternoon how “very, very” excited they are.” – not thinking more creatively about how to get their clients paid in the industry’s current Insider Recession, I noticed this…
Of the Top Ten grossers so far this year, only the top three

Box Office Hell – SuperAug

Updated, Fri Morning… first chart after the jump…

Read the full article »

International Relations

Interesting to take a look at Variety‘s report on the international box office…
Pirates 3 is now the biggest grosser outside of North America of the trilogy.
Potter 5 now looks like it will be the #3 Potter film worldwide.
The Simpsons has $230 million international, significantly more than at home.
Transformers has done surprisingly well overseas, with $328 million, topping the domestic gross.
Life Free or Die Hard has grossed $204 million overseas, making it the 7th highest grosser of the summer worldwide, leapfrogging Knocked Up and Ratatouille, though The Rat is out in fewer than half their international markets and should jump past DH4 before year end.
Ocean’s 13 is closing in on $300 million worldwide.

Friday Estimates by Klady – Aug 11

Box Office Hell – Thursday, Aug 9

UPDATED – Friday, 7:36a pdt

The most interesting thing about the Rush Hour series is that it has never been that big overseas. Though it is sold as an action film, it is a comedy of misunderstanding, which requires some language barriers to be overcome. And much as we in America hate to discuss it, Chris Tucker is Black and Black doesn’t sell very well overseas. It also doesn’t help that Jackie Chan is much more overexposed in the rest of the world than he is here in America… and that Tucker has done nothing to make himself more of a world commodity in the years since RH2. All that said, look for the film to do $150m in the rest of the world, meaning that $100 million domestic will put the overly expensive effort into the black… and over that is gravy. (This does not mean that New Line will be happy with less than $200 million or that Russell Schwartz will not somewhat unfairly absorb the heat all the way from Fiji or wherever he is putting his feet up this weekend for that if they don’t.)
And for the record, the Rush Hour 2 opening was $67.4 million on August 3 weekend, 2001.
Stardust is almost fully funded by overseas money and Paramount is treating it like something they found on their shoe, much as they did Perfume. They are spending more on ads, by contractual obligation, but the answer to whether Stardust is a flop or not will be found overseas, not here… a fact about which the folks who made the movie are completely aware. The biggest problem with that, however, is that unlike Perfume, the film is not going out to the world until after the U.S. and it could be tainted as a flop here.
The irony of Daddy Day Care is that this sequel to the much critic-killed comedy is so cheap that they will come close to profit this weekend (calculating in ancillaries) if they open anywhere near these projections.
Transformers will hit $300 million tomorrow on its way to doing 2x the total of its first six days.
Evan Almighty is not going to make it to $100 million… and it looks like Universal is not going to attempt extraordinary measures to get it there.
Sicko is fighting to pass An Inconvenient Truth to be the #4 doc box office film… and will probably just get over the finish line… expect some drama or another to rear up before the month is out.

Klady's Friday Estimates – Aug 4

Clearly, this will put the film well ahead of the $52.5m for opening weekend for the last Bourne film.
But the question of this summer remains… does anyone with a big opening get to have legs anymore?
The stat of the summer, which I didn’t get to publish this week, is that amongst the big openers, 90% of the domestic gross is now happening in 25 days or less. There are minor variations, but with The Simpsons as the sixth film to gross over $100 million in the first week of release this summer, with the other five all at or over $150 million for the first week (most ever in a previous summer… two), frontloading continues to get worse and worse, though the studios are now holding the DVD window more precious than a couple of years ago.
Anyway… all the Friday numbers will be on the MCN front page in an hour or two. Have fun.

Box Office Hell – July 3

No doubt, there will be late entries from Nikki’s Pals & EW… but I probably won’t have an available web connection to post them here. Look at the front page of MCN, where someone will update them later.
Note: The Bourne Supremacy opened in 3,304 theaters and grossed $52.5m on July 23, 2004.