Weekend Box Office Results for October 3–5, 2008

Weekend Box Office Results for October 3–5, 2008

The overall weekend was excellent, well above average for this time of year, and more than 40% above last year. Within that aggregate, the results were complicated by a surfeit of new releases which included some big winners and losers.

• Beverly Hills Chihuahua outperformed expectations and even got some decent reviews. It easily won the weekend, and made the top ten of all time among October openings.
  
• Apaloosa was a surprise winner. Based on critical assessments, it's the best movie out there, and it features two name stars (Ed Harris and Viggo), so I suppose the film's modest success shouldn't really be a surprise, but expectations were much lower than the actual. Although this film was in a mere 1000 theaters, it finished fifth overall.
  
• The two pointed satires, American Carol and Religulous, found larger audiences than expected. Both made the top ten, and the latter made it from a base of only 500 theaters.
  
• How to Lose Friends ... must have set some kind of all time record. I don't know what the worst performance is among films in 1500 or more theaters, because Mojo doesn't establish that as a separate cut-off point, but among the films in 2000 or more theaters, no film has ever averaged less than $898 per theater. Lose Friends averaged $801. To put that into perspective, the all-time bombs are Hoot, The Rocker and Lucky You. They all averaged at least $946. Gigli, the infamous Affleck stinker, averaged $1694, and that's kind of Hollywood's equivalent of the Mendoza line. So that shows you how well Lose Friends did: less than half of Gigli! Continuing the Mendoza analogy, that's about like batting .090.
  
• Blindness didn't do much better. It averaged $1185, still far below the Mondoza line. Quality is not the determining factor in these failures. Neither Lose Friends nor Blindness had good reviews, but the notices were not awful. They both had better reviews than Eagle Eye and Nights in Rodanthe, which are both limited successes.