Weekend Box Office Results for June 27–29, 2008

Weekend Box Office Results for June 27–29, 2008

The only real surprise of the weekend is that Wanted was much stronger than expected. In fact, Wanted might have beaten Wall-E head-to-head if they had been in the same number of theaters. Wanted did, in fact, win the "average per theater" category. (My son went to Wanted and ended up sitting in the front row of a sell-out.)

Wall-E also performed brilliantly and took the weekend with $62.5 million, but that was disappointing in two other ways besides losing the "average per theater": (1) It did not quite come up to expectations, which is surprising for a film called an instant classic by many critics and universally praised as the top film of the year so far. (2) It did not crack the top three among Pixar openings. It did manage to finish about 30% better than last year's Pixar film, Ratatouille, which opened exactly a year ago.

The top twelve films reached $179 million, which made the weekend the best of the year so far and beat last year's comp by 22%. It marked the fifth consecutive week to show an improvement over last year.