Daily Box Office Analysis for June 24, 2008
By David Mumpower
June 25, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Missed her by that much.
Tuesday box office looks a lot like Monday's box office did. Get Smart follows up a first weekday of $5.12 million with a Tuesday performance of $4.77 million, a decline of only 6.9%. You may recall from last week's Tuesday discussion that The Incredible Hulk fell 20.1% while The Happening fell 21.7%. Obviously, we are talking about two comparison films that have had absolutely atrocious legs thus far. Get Smart would be in a lot of trouble if it were replicating the events of last week. That in no way changes the fact that its early performance is quite positive.

Get Smart has managed $9.89 million in its first two weekdays, roughly 25.6% of its opening weekend total. I know that it is sometimes difficult to visualize such behavior sans context; let's use Knocked Up as an example. Clearly, that film is one of the leggiest in recent memory. After opening to a then-surprising $30.69 million, it went on to earn an additional $118 million (roughly), giving it a grand total of $148.76 million. That's a final box office multiplier (final box office total divided by opening weekend total) of 4.85, an almost unheard of number in this day and age.

Given this knowledge, let's put Get Smart in context to Knocked Up's first two weekdays of box office. The Seth Rogen comedy earned $4.44 million on its initial Monday followed by $4.12 million on its first Tuesday. Totaling up these numbers, Knocked Up accumulated a total of $8.56, which is 27.9% of its opening weekend total of $30.69 million. Get Smart's 25.6% isn't quite at that level, but it also had an opening weekend that was 26% larger. As we discussed yesterday and countless times before then, the larger a number is, the more skewed evaluations based upon percentage holdover become. So, Get Smart's 25.6% is on a par with Knocked Up's 27.9% once we factor in the data-skew caused by the disparity in opening weekends. Do I think Get Smart will continue to hold up on a level with Knocked Up? Probably not. The beauty of a column about daily numbers analysis, however, is that we get to track thought processes such as this from their beginning until their natural conclusion.

The daily box office news for The Love Guru is not as positive as was the case yesterday. Reality apparently set in as the Mike Myers "comedy" (Paramount's word, not mine) experienced the largest decline in the top ten. Its $1.54 million total on Tuesday represents a decline of 14.0% from Monday's $1.79 million. The only other two releases in yesterday's top ten that fell by more than 10% were The Incredible Hulk and The Happening, and that's not good company to be keeping. Guru's $3.33 million for Monday and Tuesday represents 23.9% of its weekend box office, which is still respectable for a film of this opening weekend scale. Something tells me that the Monday number was an aberration, however, and we will continue to see the bottom fall out for Guru in coming days. Of course, Mike Myers has dated Eliza Dushku and you haven't, so he's got that going for him, which is nice.

Overall box office for the top ten was down 11.1% from last Tuesday's $18,447,962. Yesterday's total of $16,397,011 is the second lowest in June. It is 8.7% behind June 10's $17,952,226, but it is 4.8% above June 3's $15,649,178. July is poised to be a lot better than June in this regard, as strong performers like Wall-E, Hancock and The Dark Knight enter the fray.