Other Crap

Weekend Box Office Results for June 29–July 1, 2007

Ratatouille won the weekend and got a fistful of good reviews, but performed at the very low end of its range of expectations, and nearly 20% below what our two sources predicted.

Die Hard performed as expected.

Sicko took in as much per screen as Die Hard, and Michael Moore was spinning the results very positively over the weekend, but it was actually below analyst's estimates, and it came nowhere near the phenomenal results of Fahrenheit 911. On the other hand, if F-911 had never existed, people would be marvelling at Sicko's astounding results "for a documentary." It's just that F-911 set the bar at an impossible height. In other words, you can probably spin Sicko's results any way you like.

The new chick-flick barely snuck into the top ten, but you can spin that positively if you care to. The prognosticators thought it would be even worse.

Knocked Up would have continued to demonstrate the best legs of the carry-overs, since it dropped only 32% from last year, but Pirates had some truly fluky results. Cap'n Jack dropped only 30%, despite losing about a quarter of his screens! Damned if I know why, but I'm not so embarrassed about that because the analysts didn't see it coming either.

The weekend was about 5% over last year. The current year has mirrored last year's results for the past six weeks, always staying within single digits in either direction.

Next week is the big battle of the summer. It was last year's best weekend. Pirates opened with an astounding $132 million weekend. That would seem almost untouchable under most circumstances, but analysts are saying that The Transformers is going to be humongous, so it could be a good match-up.