Other Crap

Top three hold their places at the Weekend Box Office - July 22-24, 2005

• I've never seen a week in which the new releases were so thoroughly rejected by the public. I had suggested earlier this week that Weekend Warrior's predictions for new releases might be light. Boy, was that wrong! They were actually too high.
• The week's major disappointment was Michael Bay's $122 million The Island, which has two attractive and competent stars and received respectable reviews. It opened with $12 million - a disaster of Alexander proportions. What went wrong? Well, I don't know but I talked to my youngest son on Wednesday and asked him if he was going to The Island. His answer? "What's that?" When I told him, he thought it sounded pretty good. He pays for 2-3 movies a week, so I have to think the marketing for that movie was way off.
• Let me just mention in passing that Michael Bay seems to be collecting on the bad karma he earned by not allowing Scarlett Johansson to show her breasts in this movie, even though she wanted to.
• The other two big releases were really no stronger. Bad News Bears and The Devil's Rejects pulled in about the same revenues per screen as The Island.
• Some of the smaller newcomers to the Top 10 did OK. Hustle and Flow had solid numbers (#2 in revenues per screen) on a thousand screens, and that penguin thing again performed quite well, this time on 700 screens.
• Wedding Crashers was the big success story. It dropped only 23% from last weekend, which would be good for any period, but is extremely impressive this week, because overall revenues for the top twelve films dropped 15% from last week. That means that Wedding Crashers almost held its share, dropping only two points - from 22% of the aggregate last week to 20% this week.