Weekend Box Office Results for October 1-3, 2010

Weekend Box Office Results for October 1-3, 2010

The weekend was a slow one in general, with about a 4% decline from last year during a time of year that is never particularly impressive to begin with. As expected, The Social Network was the top movie by a wide margin, but even that film performed below expectations. ($23 million, versus an expectation of maybe $28). And what little success it had can be partially attributed to the fact that it faced the weakest competition of the year.

The other two new films bombed completely. They were the second and third worst films of the year among films in 2000 or more theaters, beating only MacGruber! (One or both of them may end up also beating Jonah Hex when the numbers are finalized.) They opened with five million each. It's quite rare to have two such poor performers open widely at the same time, and that clearly explains why the weekend ran below last year. Indeed, it's amazing that it came within 4% of last year!

The weak box office performance was no surprise in the case of Case 39, which was expected to perform poorly and did, finishing seventh with only $5 million dollars. The surprise came from Let Me In, which could not cash in on the latest vampire-mania. It actually finished lower than Case 39, taking 8th place when it was expected to finish second. The other films which have performed that poorly this year (Case 39, Jonah Hex, and MacGuber), have been reviled and scorned by the critics (the "top critics" scores at RT are 0%, 7% and 29% respectively), but Let Me In is a critical darling (86% positive reviews), and it's a remake of a foreign film which the critics liked even better (97% positive). The failure of that film gives you some indication of how irrelevant critics have become to our moviegoing choices.