Word: weekender
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...numbers - the studios' early tallies of the weekend gross, based on hard numbers for Friday, estimates for Saturday and sheer guesswork for Sunday - say that Christmas Carol won the weekend with $31 million, more than double the $14 million take of the runner-up, and last week's winner, Michael Jackson's This Is It. The very odd Clooney comedy came in third, with $13.3 million, just beating out the $12.9 million gleaned by the low-budget alien-abduction thriller The Fourth Kind. Trailing these were the unkillable phenomenon of Paranormal Activity, with $8.6 million in its seventh week...
...Christmas Carol cost a bundle, $200 million, and no doubt Disney would have liked a bigger start for their way-before-Christmas movie. But it registered the best first weekend of any Jim Carrey movie of the past five years in which he has been seen. (In the CGI-cartoon version of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, Carrey provided the elephant's voice.) And Goats opened stronger than any Clooney movie of this decade that didn't costar Brad Pitt. The Box certainly didn't measure up to recent Diaz openings, even middling ones. But, like Goats, it cost...
...believe, the success of a movie is as much perception as reality. Insiders predict films' box-office take in the early part of the week, monitor the returns on Saturday and then, when the numbers are announced on Sunday morning, say how surprised or disappointed they are. Forecasting the weekend grosses has become a rabid Internet pastime, and the spur to free publicity when news services cover the "story" in Sunday columns like this one. Stats freaks get to crystal-ball movies' grosses on Thursday, then analyze their predictions three days later. Some people bet money on the outcomes...
...determined by the recent finishes of teams or horses; the line-makers are predicting outcomes on past strengths and weaknesses. New movies, especially nonsequels like Christmas Carol, Goats and The Box, have no track record; they have only the expectations, high or low, of industry swamis. The Sunday-morning "weekend" numbers are also a guessing game, since the final tabulations don't come in until Monday afternoon. Declaring a weekend champ on Sunday is like saying who won a World Series game after six innings. Twice this past summer, the wrong winner was proclaimed. And on one recent weekend...
Here are a few observations from a New York outsider. In the first weekend after Halloween, and with the spine-numbing pleasure of Paranormal Activity in many moviegoers' minds, The Fourth Kind benefitted from a beguilingly creepy ad campaign, giving glimpses of alien possession. Audiences didn't feel the same urgency, seven weeks before Christmas, to see the 467th version of A Christmas Carol, whose trailer emphasized hectic, hurtful chase scenes over the Scroogean character comedy and hearth-and-heart sentiment. As for Precious, $100,000 a screen is a feat accomplished only twice before (by Dreamgirls and Brokeback Mountain...