Word: box
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Buying, though, is different from conspicuous consumption. At the string of big-box retailers north of town, a few miles before city streets fall away and the horizon takes over, shoppers leaving Kohl's and Best Buy and Shoe Carnival are carrying bags - but not huge ones. In plenty of other places, that might be a sign of cutting back. Here in Bismarck, though, moderation is business as usual. Yes, Bismarckers like their things; it's rare to drive down a residential block and not see at least a few boats or RVs sitting in driveways. But splurging never really...
...there's no denying that Transformers 2 is a smash, having earned something like $700 million worldwide in 12 days. So far, the movie is ahead of its blockbuster predecessor - though sequels usually come out of the gate with more power than the original, which establishes a brand. Its box-office domination may annoy critics and sentient adults, but this savvily marketed franchise is as impervious to failure as McDonald's. It's not a fast-food but a fast-film experience, cunningly mixing the twin fanboy magnets of large marauding toys and luscious Megan...
There's an even bigger problem in the weekend box-office tallies announced each Sunday around noon Eastern time. They are taken as an accurate summary of an industry's health, like the Dow Jones average, but they're grounded less in facts than in wish fulfillment. They take the hard data on the Friday and Saturday grosses, then add each studio's educated guess as to how its movie is likely to do on Sunday. Sometimes those guesses are wrong. A month ago, Up was declared the weekend winner over The Hangover, but the Vegas comedy lured more customers...
...ruling that the team ahead after the sixth inning has won the game, or declaring an election over when the sampling polls come in. So why make these figures public a day before they can be validated? Because Sunday is a slow news day, and the report of the box-office winner, almost always included in the day's top headlines, is free publicity for the movies cited as being the most popular...
Here are the studios' official weekend estimates for the top 10 movies, as reported by Box Office Mojo...