Daily Box Office Analysis for July 1, 2008
By David Mumpower
July 2, 2008
WALL-E was the #1 film at the box office yesterday, its fifth consecutive revenue win. That streak will be ending today, however, as a new entrant has arrived and its impact is already being felt. WALL-E earned $7,601,082 yesterday, but the real story is the film with the second best total. Its name is Hancock, and the movie's $6,835,034 is exemplary for a title that was only exhibited from 7 p.m. on last night.
I had not expected Sony to release official numbers for Hancock, so the focus of this column will not be as WALL-E specific as had been intended. Hancock immediately becomes the bigger story. BOP's own Reagen Sulewski has projected a $108 million total for the five and a half day period from last night until Sunday. I ordinarily agree with Reagen on such matters, but I have felt he was underestimating this one. Yesterday's number doesn't establish a pattern for either of our expectations yet. It is one of the better pre-opening day sneaks in recent memory, but it is also roughly $2 million less than Transformers made in roughly the same situation last year. In fact, that entire day of box office uncannily mirrors what happened yesterday, as the other film generating major discussion was the prior weekend's major release, Ratatouille. If you want to check out the 2007 story, click here. I'm pressed for time today since I am going to see...yup, Hancock. So, it's a happy little coincidence that a lot of last year's data is relevant here.
In terms of where Hancock goes from here, BOP is obviously expecting it to be a juggernaut as is the studio. No matter what they may say, anything less than $100 million by Sunday is going to be a disappointment for them. I clearly do not expect this to be an issue, but we will be able to better able evaluate the veracity of this starting tomorrow. A full day of box office to compare against the $6.8 million in the bank will give us a good first impression of viewer demand for the project. The one caveat here is that calendar configuration will hurt Hancock more than Transformers.
We have discussed the concept of the "anti-holiday" on BOP on several occasions. For those of you new to the site A) Welcome! and B) Where in the Blue Hell have you been? But I digress. The point is that a certain kind of holiday falling on a weekend day (Friday, Saturday or Sunday) can negatively impact its box office. The reason for this is that July 4th, December 24th and December 31st are calendar dates that are not conducive to strong box office results. If one of those dates happens to fall on a weekend, films will experience artificial box office deflation on those specific days. Transformers avoided this fate as its July 4th occurred on a Wednesday. Due to the Leap Year, we have bumped forward two days in the cycle from 2007, leaving July 4th on a Friday.
The last time this happened was in 2003 when the two major new movies in release were Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde. Those films earned combined revenue of $18.6 million on Thursday as opposed to $19.2 million on Friday. When box office only increases 3.2% from Thursday to Friday for the top two films in release, something troublesome is in play. So, Hancock is going to do brilliantly today and tomorrow, but the difference between Thursday and Friday numbers will not be the bump that we would usually expect entering the weekend. Try to keep this in mind over the next 72 hours as you're off BBQ-ing and shooting off fireworks. And light a roman candle for me.
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