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The other aspect of the week that should have come into perspective for you by now is the overall top ten box office's continued decline throughout the week. After starting off at $13,782,558 on Monday, the Thursday revenue has fallen all the way down to $11,495,727. This is a decline of 4.3% from Wednesday, but (more importantly) it also represents a fall of 16.6% from Monday. I had hinted earlier in the week that we would slowly examine daily box office behavior over the course of the summer, and that will be the case. The brighter pupils have already reached the appropriate conclusion, however; domestic box office is a never-ending cycle of Saturday summits through Thursday valleys. On Friday, box office spikes again and the process is ready to start all over again the following day.

One other aspect of summer box office we will be tracking is weekday-to-weekday comparisons from 2006 to 2007. Much has been made of the improvement in box office this year as opposed to last. In fact, there is a chance that 2007 sees domestic totals in excess of $10 billion for the first time ever. All that is required is a modest 6.4% increase from last year. Box office is currently up more than that in 2007, but don't get too excited. Part of it is certainly indicative of the quality of releases in the first half of this year.

The other part is that in addition to ticket price inflation increasing revenues this year, it's also being measured against the second lowest year for overall ticket sales in the 2000s. In fact, if someone is trying to tell you that the box office slump is a myth, all you need to do is point out to them the following. 2005 and 2006 saw the lowest single year ticket sales since 1997 and the lowest two-year combined totals since 1996 and 1997. Box office ticket sales are not what they had been for the previous ten years and don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise.

Keeping this in mind, weekday ticket revenue for Monday through Thursday of the first week of June 2006 was $65,696,998. The top four anchor films were The Break Up, X-Men: The Last Stand, Over the Hedge and The Da Vinci Code. There was one anomaly involved, though. The Omen re-make created a 666 marketing campaign last year including a release date of June 6, 2006 aka 6/6/6. So, its Tuesday total of $12,633,666 (those last three numbers being so obviously tweaked) blows the curve. The Omen promptly fell of the table after this stellar Tuesday debut, making it a blue-print example of a one-day wonder release. Even so, it will skew the results for this week and this will not be the only time over the summer such an event occurs. A single mid-week opener will always dramatically impact a comparison between weekdays of two given years.

Keeping that in mind, this week's Monday through Thursday total is $50,373,352, combined revenues falling well short of the first week of June last year. In fact, it's a full 23.3% behind the same time frame in 2006. With the following June weekend in 2006 earning $144.55 million, Ocean's Thirteen better be explosive if 2007 is to keep up the needed pace.

Daily Box Office for Thursday, June 7, 2007
Rank	Film	Distributor	Daily Gross	Daily Change	Weekly Change	Running Total
1	Knocked Up	Universal	$3,345,555	- 7.9%	N/A	$46,223,940
2	Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End	Walt Disney Pictures	$3,327,937	- 4.3%	N/A	$232,297,818
3	Shrek the Third	DreamWorks	$2,501,531	0.0%	N/A	$266,142,451
4	Mr. Brooks	MGM	$805,281	- 8.6%	N/A	$13,682,301
5	Spider-Man 3	Sony/Columbia	$721,595	+ 1.4%	N/A	$321,280,163
6	Waitress	Fox Searchlight	$229,475	- 2.6%	N/A	$10,366,449
7	28 Weeks Later	Fox Atomic	$143,966	- 5.7%	N/A	$27,219,754
8	Gracie	Picturehouse	$150,000	0.0%	N/A	$1,950,000
9	Bug	Lionsgate	$130,940	- 10.4%	N/A	$6,743,839
10	Disturbia	DreamWorks	$139,447	+ 5.4%	N/A	$77,245,463
Box office data supplied by Exhibitor Relations

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