MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, May 28th, 2007 - 21 Comments »

Sunday Estimates by Klady

memdaybo.jpg

21 Comments »

21 Responses to “Sunday Estimates by Klady”

  1. tjfar67 says:
    May 28, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    Spider-Man 2 is still doing well.

  2. Tofu says:
    May 28, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    For an engagement that has run for almost three years, the numbers are phenomenal.

  3. JPK says:
    May 28, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    The number that still amazes me is $163M for Wild Hogs. Good God, I did not see that coming. In fact, for a bit I would smash my head against hard objects just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. 14 stitches later, I’ve accepted reality.

  4. Rob says:
    May 28, 2007 at 4:07 pm

    Speaking of Wild Hogs, I wanna know how Disney macguyvered that 151% increase out of a 13-week-old movie to elbow Away from Her out of the top ten? Sounds fishy.

  5. David Poland says:
    May 28, 2007 at 5:15 pm

    Sorry about the sloppiness on the SM3 thing… it’s been corrected on the site… and I will leave it up here as a tribute to our occassional flake outs.

  6. EDouglas says:
    May 28, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    Rob, I wanna know the same thing. That movie was gone and out… #17 last week, lost some more theatres this weekend… and now it’s back in the Top 10? The only thing I can think is that kids bought tickets for it and snuck into Bug. But Lord knows why they would.
    I’m annoyed though because I’ve been celebrating Wild Hogs being out of the Top 10 after ten weeks up there… and now it’s back. *sigh*

  7. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:
    May 28, 2007 at 8:07 pm

    Yeah, I find it extremely hard to believe that Wild Hogs is still making over $3000 a theatre. I was sad to read Box Office Prophet’s weekend wrap up and seeing Wild Hogs and not Away From Her. Was there any indication of Wild Hogs‘ resurgance (i guess you can call it that) on Friday? I remember Away from her was in tenth.
    Crazy.
    Still, Disturbia making it to $80mil most definitely is also quite crazy, but at least it’s that and not The Invisible.

  8. Jimmy the Gent says:
    May 28, 2007 at 9:21 pm

    The screening of Waitress I went to today was packed. Also, it was one of main screens at the AMC 24. That surprised me. Everyone seemed to love it. I left wondering if it could tun into a Little Miss Sunshine-type of hit. I suspect Shelly could get a nomination for her screenplay. That would be a nice tribute to her and the movie. I think Waitress is actually a great small-scale movie. It knows exactly what it’s doing. The ironic part is that 20 to 25 years ago it would’ve been the kind movie that a studio would’ve made for someone like Sissy Spaceck or Jessica Lange. Maybe even Jill Clayburgh.
    My biggest disappointment of the season so far is the critical reaction to Lucky You. It’s a rambling, character-driven chamber piece that deserved better than to go up against SM3. It’s not as great as Toback’s The Gambler or California Split, but has the same kind of spirit. There are no real villains. No one is ever really in danger. It’s just a week or so in the life of some lonely people who are at a crossroads. Eric Bana is turning into one of the most interesting leading men working today. I prefer his mixture of sincerity and intensity over Gosling’s Sean Penn impersonation. I still love watching Drew Barymore in these kinds of roles. She’s just a joy to watch. Grantred, poker is not the most cinematic of sporting events (Casino Royale excluded). Hanson does a very good job of drawing the audience’s attention to the poker games. We watch because we want to see how the characters will act based on whether they win or lose. The World Championship of Poker sequence is surprisingly suspenseful. It also doesn’t go they way you think it will. I think it’s a classic case of critics falling in line with the studio. The film had been pulled from the schedule so often that they just assumed it was because it was a bad movie and never really gave it chance. It never ocurred to critics that Lucky You is the kind of movie that simply can’t be sold in 30 second ad. A lot of Eric Roth’s dialogue hinges on the context it is presented in. Out of context some of the literary lines sound really forced. It plays better than it reads.

  9. Eric says:
    May 28, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    I didn’t like Lucky You all that much, but I did like the way it presented Las Vegas as it really is rather than the way it’s typically glamourized in the movies. It’s a dirty, run-down city full of exhausted, sometimes desperate people. Hanson definitely got that right.

  10. doug r says:
    May 28, 2007 at 10:58 pm

    Looks like about 100 theaters dropped Wild Hogs, so its average went up about 8X per screen. Something hinky going on for sure…

  11. jeffmcm says:
    May 28, 2007 at 11:59 pm

    “Disturbia making it to $80mil most definitely is also quite crazy, but at least it’s that and not The Invisible.”
    That’s kind of like saying ‘at least I only got two black eyes instead of kicked in the nuts’.

  12. Joe Straat says:
    May 29, 2007 at 2:52 am

    Well, it could be Wild Hogs hit a bunch of dollar theaters. We have to remember that it’s a very casual viewer movie or for people who don’t go to a lot of them very often. Those people would be possibly more drawn to them because they don’t really give a damn about seeing it first. And now would be about the time a succesful movie like Wild Hogs would be hitting the dolalr theaters.

  13. Rob says:
    May 29, 2007 at 7:05 am

    Do dollar theaters still exist?

  14. Eric says:
    May 29, 2007 at 7:18 am

    There are still a couple of dollar theaters around the Milwaukee area. They’re really great in late winter and late summer, when they have all the smaller stuff you never got around to seeing amidst the Oscar- and blockbuster-rush.

  15. Wrecktum says:
    May 29, 2007 at 9:20 am

    Wild Hogs was booked in a ton of drive-ins this past weekend (the first weekend many drive-ins open).
    Neither the drive-in nor dollar house market is dead. Some, in fact, are flourishing.

  16. LexG says:
    May 29, 2007 at 11:48 am

    Some idiot single Dad brought HIS KIDS to see BUG at a matinee this weekend. I can only wonder how the HORROR/MONSTER MOVIE MARKETING backfired on even the few giddy teens and genre fans who thought they were getting EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS and instead got a grim, talky psychosexual chamber piece.
    But BRINGING YOUR KIDS? And of course he didn’t leave, and aside from being visibly bored, didn’t have any reaction whatsoever to his kids seeing 101 minutes of sex, nudity, spousal abuse, drug consumption, endless profanity, and bodily mutilation. The kids were like 4 and 6 years old, and, of course, this was in L.A. I see this kind of thing all the time– most recently, the dad (maybe the same one) who brought Junior to see HILLS HAVE EYES 2. What the FUCK is wrong with people??????????????

  17. Me says:
    May 29, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    Maybe he thinks therapy in a few years will be cheaper than a babysitter now?

  18. Direwolf says:
    May 29, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    I got a kid in therapy and the babysitter is a helluva of lot cheaper. Each week of therapy runs 15 movie tickets here in Chicago! Thank goodness the kid in thearpy is satisfied wathicng IFC and Sundance as I don’t have anything left for movies!!

  19. Jimmy the Gent says:
    May 29, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    EVERYONE should spend a week in therapy. It would help a lot, even if there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with making sure.
    My dad took me to whatever he wanted to see. He wasn’t going to sit through Disney re-releases. He monitored what I saw and made sure I knew the difference between movies and real life. In other words, he TALKED to me. That’s what good parenting is. I can still remember being 8 years old and going to the 10:00 show of Full Metal Jacket. (My dad is a Vietnam veteran.) It definitely made an impression on me. My older sister was 14 years old. She became a HUGE Modine fan after that. The one thing my dad didn’t tolerate was his kids talking during a movie. If you didn’t like it you could just go to sleep. That’s how you handle kids when you take them to adult movies.

  20. Joe Straat says:
    May 29, 2007 at 7:21 pm

    Good call on the drive in, Wrecktum. Come to think of it, the drive in we have in town had At World’s End doubled up with Wild Hogs. I’d imagine with similar bookings, that would bump up its gross quite a bit. I wouldn’t think a lot of people REALLY saw it, though. Drive-Ins start at around 9:00 and I’d imagine with intermission, the whole thing would end at around 2:00 a.m.
    I watched Aliens with my dad when I was 2. At home. I was bit of a crazy kid, so it took until about the original Transformers movie before I could go (And there’d be hell to pay if I didn’t and my brother did and he got to brag about it). I don’t remember Aliens as much except when I saw it years later. The only traumatizing thing was all the disimbodied heads Princess Mombi had in Return to Oz. A little kid and disimbodied heads screaming do not mix.
    I remember going to Black Hawk Down in the late night showing in the middle of a snowstorm. No one could possbily think to take their kids to this, right? No. The other person in the theater had brought their two kids, who proceeded to play tag throughout the first half hour. They settled down once bodies started getting sawed in half by machine gun fire. Oy.

  21. Wrecktum says:
    May 30, 2007 at 8:10 am

    “Good call on the drive in, Wrecktum. Come to think of it, the drive in we have in town had At World’s End doubled up with Wild Hogs. I’d imagine with similar bookings, that would bump up its gross quite a bit.”
    Bullseye. That’s exactly what happened.

Leave a Reply

Box Office

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

“I don’t really think, Sean, that you need to know about my various sexual liaisons. Or that anyone else needs to. I did write about them. I filled a hundred pages of Moleskine notebooks with my one-night stands, my affairs. But I decided they didn’t belong in a professional memoir. First of all, these are real people we’re talking about. Many of them were enjoyable. Some were abject failures. My wife said to me when she read the pages, ‘Of what purpose is this in a memoir? Of what purpose is this other than to titillate?’ The point is, I never see them. It’s because I have nothing in common with them, frankly. And probably didn’t at the time. I could not provide a sensible reason why I married these women. The thing is, in the case of my marriages, it takes two people to fuck up a marriage. It wasn’t simply the fault of these women that I lost interest in them and realised they were insignificant relationships. Which is how I look at them right now–as being insignificant. I see them as blips.”
~ William Friedkin On Cutting Interviewers Off At The Sass

“I have to imagine from Mr. Spielberg’s point of view, the paradigm shift in the 1970s was just the new “normal,” a “halcyon era” from which we are straying in the 21st century–because theatrical exhibition is tenuous (as it has been since the 1940s), the home video market has dried up and people are watching pirated movies on their phone. Spielberg’s coming-of-age era was for him the halcyon period that the 21st century “implosion” will cause to go “crashing into the ground.” But he is wrong. The market for movies is actually diverse and highly segmented–although from the top-down movie industry vantage point and media punditry you would not think this to be true.  Would we really mourn for Mr. Spielberg or ourselves if Lincoln would have been made for cable or had played on public television?  Is it bad for humanity that cable television is creating wonderful, resonant stories in long-form series that people want to watch at home on TV (or streamed onto their computer)? I don’t think so, but it is a paradigm shift and it might affect people’s theatrical moviegoing habits. Televisions in people’s homes have had that effect for seven decades–it is not a new phenomenon. As Art House cinema impresarios we need to focus on what WE can do at our theaters and in our communities. It is not productive for us to fret over what pundits say or about what well-meaning filmmakers like the Stevens–Spielberg and Soderbergh–say. We should fret about what we can do in our communities. What we can do to support filmmakers.”
~ From A Response By Russ Collins, CEO, Michigan Theater – Ann Arbor And Director, Art House Convergence, To Mr. Spielberg