Weekend Box Office Results for February 29–March 2, 2008

Weekend Box Office Results for February 29 – March 2, 2008

The weekend came in about 24% below last year. That's about $26 million dollars. Fifteen of that 26 million was directly attributable to the poor performance of Semi-Pro, which came in at half of its expected $30 million. Will Ferrell is normally money in the bank for filmmakers, but moviegoers love Will in comedies, and the word quickly spread that this film not really a comedy but an underdog sports story - and that's not why people spend their dollars on Will Ferrell movies.

The rest of the shortfall was just a general softness. The past three weeks have shown substantial deficits to last year. That followed a long streak of solid positives which covered all of January and December.

There were some positives. The other Boleyn Girl was substantially above the estimates, and had the highest average gross per theater of any film in twenty theaters or more. In fact, it was the highest by far. The average for Boleyn was more than $7,000 while Semi-Pro was a distant runner-up witn an average below $5,000. The other new film, Penelope, performed poorly, but not nearly so poorly as expected. Some thought it would not even come close to the top ten, but it finished eighth or ninth (only a few dollars separate the two places).

Juno did continue its streak of top ten finishes, but this week will almost certainly mark the end of it. It barely clung to tenth.