Word: weekend
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Here's the deal: when the studios release their weekend grosses on Sunday morning, they have hard numbers for Friday, rough estimates for Saturday, and for Sunday they use a combination of exit-polling, comparison of their movies with others in the same genre, bracketology and tea leaves. In other words, they guess. Sometimes they guess wrong. On the first Sunday of June last year, Warner Bros. announced that its new comedy The Hangover had taken in $43.3 million, which made it second to Pixar's animated feature Up, at $44.2 million. The final count showed that The Hangover...
...MONDAY UPDATE: The final numbers produced a mild upset. Clash of the Titans won the weekend with an actual $26.6 million (close to the Warner Bros. estimate) to Date Night's $25.2 million. Fox honchos had predicted that Tina and Steve would enjoy a $7.1 million Sunday date, which proved to be fully 30% higher than the $5.43 million the movie took in. How to Train Your Dragon's estimated $25.4 million was also a little high; the true total was $24.9 million. So Clash gets to brag in this week's commercials that it's still...
...directed by Shawn Levy of the Night at the Museum franchise, performed slightly above industry expectations, whichever slot it finally occupies. It will finish well ahead of Fey's 2008 star vehicle, Baby Mama, and if the estimates hold, it will have sold about the same amount of first-weekend tickets as Carell's first hit, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The movie benefited from one of those titles that virtually demands that a couple see it, as when Valentine's Day was released on Valentine's Day weekend. And though Date Night gleaned only a modest B rating from...
Clash dropped 56% from its opening weekend - not a disastrous plummet, considering that the movie got mixed-to-hostile reviews and a lowish B-minus CinemaScore rating, and that the geekosphere was vexed that Clash was converted at the last minute from 2-D to fake 3-D. (Call it faux-D.) Costing $125 million to make (compared with Date Night's $55 million), the movie has already earned $110 million in North America and another $45 million abroad. Action movies almost always do better in foreign markets than comedies. Baby Mama, for example, took in $60.5 million at home...
...acid test of a movie's popularity is its staying power. Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? fell a precipitous 62.4% from its opening three days - the biggest second-weekend drop since Valentine's fell 70.4%. Perry's fan base is avid but limited; nearly everyone who wants to see his films sees them the instant they hit the theaters. Other movies keep soaring on good word of mouth. How to Train Your Dragon opened two weeks ago at $43.7 million, on the weak side for a DreamWorks 3-D animated feature. But it fell only...