Daily Box Office Analysis for July 10, 2007
By David Mumpower
July 11, 2007
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Care to take a swim, little girl?
The big news today has nothing to do with a movie in the top ten for July 10, 2007. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix did not technically get released until 12:01 a.m. this morning; ergo, its box office does not count for Tuesday. Exhibitor Relations has reported overnight revenue for the movie, however, and it is incredible. The fifth Potter movie saw $12 million worth of consumers choose to join Dumbledore's Army at the first possible moment. For some recent context to such a performance, simply consider that Transformers sneaks began at 8 p.m. last Monday evening. That movie managed "only" $8.8 million with an extra four hours of previews available for consumers. Potter has exceeded this total by 36.4% in midnight screenings alone. We are talking about a movie that just earned $155.4 million over six (and a half) days that has just received a serious beat-down from Team Daniel Radcliffe.

If we compare Potter's midnight performance to other recent tentpole titles, the news is similarly positive. This total is almost double what Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire managed with its sneaks. It is also over $2 million more than Spider-Man 3, the movie that recently broke the records for single largest day of box office as well as best opening weekend ever. This is lofty company Order of the Phoenix is surpassing. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, however, Potter 5 is not going to have a chance at breaking the opening weekend record. With the decision to launch on Wednesday, a lot of the demand will be met well before Friday, thereby lowering the weekend total by quite a bit. One thing I can say for certain, however, is that tomorrow's column is going to feature discussion of an amazing single day of box office. Over $50 million appears to be a distinct possibility despite the fact that Wednesday is not an off-day for adult consumers.

Today's actual top 10 has one big story. That is the 69.9% decline of Transformers last Tuesday's record-setting $27.45 million to yesterday's $8.25 million. This is the largest Tuesday-to-Tuesday decline within the top 10 by a wide margin. Live Free Or Die Hard claims the second largest drop at 53.5%, going from $4.45 million to $2.07 million. So, Transformers doesn't just take a beating, but it takes the worst beating of anybody by quite a bit. This is not completely unexpected given that we are talking about measuring it against the biggest Tuesday of all time. Even so, the degree of the drop is precipitous, and tomorrow's hold-over seems destined to be worse. Transformers will probably do around the same amount tomorrow, while it will be measured against an even better day of box office, $29.1 million. A drop in excess of 70% appears likely.

Since Order of the Phoenix is not factored into the top ten for yesterday, box office combined for $20,039,328. That is a decrease of 8.7% from Monday's $21,941,647, and it is down a whopping 59.3% from last Tuesday's holiday-inflated/Transformers-inflated total of $49,270,000. Hopefully, you now have a broader perspective of just what holiday inflation is and how it works. Tuesday's box office is solid by summer standards to date, but it can't hold a torch to what happened last week when we had the dynamic combination of a mid-week off-day and a blockbuster new release...and no, I don't mean License to Wed.