Daily Box Office Analysis for June 6, 2007
By David Mumpower
June 7, 2007
BoxOfficeProphets.com


Wednesday box office shows Knocked Up continuing its run as the most popular movie in America, but Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End does make some in-roads toward reclaiming the title. Knocked Up earned $3.63 million, while At World's End earned $3.48 million. The $150,000 difference is much less than the $325,000 between the two movies on Tuesday and $285,000 on Monday. Knocked Up declined 11.8% while the third Pirates production fell 8.3%. These were two of the three steepest drops within the top ten, along with fourth place finisher Mr. Brooks, which fell 11.2% to $881k.

So, let's look at how Knocked Up's 11.8% depreciation compares to the comparison films we have been using all week. Wedding Crashers, the (beyond) best case scenario performer, fell 10% on its first Wednesday to $4.9 million. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy fell 5.4% to $3.6 million. The 40 Year-Old Virgin fell 10.3% to $2.6 million. The Break-Up fell 15.4% to $3.4 million. American Wedding fell a stiff 19.7% to $3.6 million. And Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story fell a whopping 23.3% to $4.0 million.

As you can see from the above, the 11.8% decline might seem troubling upon first glance, but the moment we put it into perspective with the other big summer comedies in recent years, it's actually better than most. Knocked Up has gained on American Wedding and Dodgeball in terms of actual dollars, catching one and getting within $400,000 of the other after trailing by $1.2 million just yesterday. It's all wine and roses for Universal Pictures and Judd Apatow right now.

What the above two paragraphs do represent, however, is the lesser popularity of hump day movie attendance in North America relative to earlier in the week. Box office for the top ten fell from $13,073,045 on Tuesday to $12,022,022 on Wednesday, a decline of 8%. This comes on the heels of Tuesday being down 4.4% from Monday's $13,782,558. So, the difference in business between Monday and Wednesday is 14.6%.

Alternately, if you would like to visualize this in terms of ticket sales, the average price of a 2007 movie ticket purchase is $6.79. So, Monday saw ticket sales of 2,029,832. On Tuesday, there were 1,925,338. By Wednesday, the number had dropped to 1,770,548. That's over a quarter million fewer tickets sold in North America on Wednesday - 259,284 to be exact. This is the consumer behavior you should grow to expect as we continue the daily box office numbers discussion on weekdays throughout the summer.