Daily Box Office Analysis for August 6, 2007
By David Mumpower
August 7, 2007
So, where does that leave us in terms of The Bourne Ultimatum's Monday box office overview? The first piece of the puzzle is murky. Bourne's 13.2% retention from the weekend to Monday beats only The Simpsons Movie while its Sunday-Monday decline beats everything but The Simpsons Movie. Given that the other three titles had larger Sundays than Bourne, however, that's not the best indicator in the world. Right now, The Bourne Ultimatum has had what I would describe as the expected type of Monday for a title such as this. Since Tuesday and Wednesday are when the bottom started to fall out for The Simpsons Movie, we should know more about the hold-over appeal of Bourne through the next two days of discussion.
There were three other openers this past weekend. Out of the mixed bag trio, Bratz failed to make the top ten yesterday, preventing me from using any number of prostitution jokes I had prepared for just this occasion. If only I Know Who Killed Me had shown some staying power... Hot Rod, the instantly forgettable Jackass clone featuring some Saturday Night Live nobody whose name I couldn't be bothered to learn finished in eighth place. Monday box office of $1,013,947 does little on the whole save for exemplifying the overall strength of the top ten. Readers of this column from earlier in the summer will recall that only three films in the top ten had earned over $1,000,000 when we started the summer box office daily analysis. We have now reached a point in the schedule where even the dregs like Hot Rod can have that type of Monday.
This point can be made even clearer with this piece of data. The summer box office for the first day of our discussions, June 4th, saw combined top ten box office receipts of $13,782,558. Compare that with yesterday's total of $23,808,685. That's a 72.7% improvement or, in more important terminology for our discussions, a box office expansion based upon two key facets of the movie business. The first is a larger number of quality titles in release while the second (and only logical explanation for Hot Rod's million dollar Monday) is excess free time for the people in the sweet spot for movie attendance, teens. This is the nature of the industry, and an aspect so obvious that it makes the fact that studio bosses had ignored the summer period prior to the release of Jaws all the more puzzling. Conventional wisdom can be a dangerous thing, my friends.
The $23,808,685 tally for the top ten represents a solid increase of 7.7% from last Monday's total of $22,096,871. In fact, this is the second biggest Monday of the summer to date, trailing only the $28,879,748 from July 2, the unofficial debut of Transformers. Suffice it to say that yesterday was a very good day to be in the movie business.
| 1 |
The Bourne Ultimatum |
Universal |
$9,131,700 |
New |
$78,415,390 |
| 2 |
The Simpsons Movie |
Twentieth Century Fox |
$3,968,570 |
- 57.2% |
$132,029,148 |
| 3 |
Hairspray |
New Line Cinema |
$1,810,000 |
- 27.7% |
$80,665,000 |
| 4 |
Underdog |
Walt Disney Pictures |
$1,803,992 |
New |
$13,389,113 |
| 5 |
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry |
Universal |
$1,743,700 |
- 34.0% |
$93,539,150 |
| 6 |
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix |
Warner Bros. |
$1,627,226 |
- 33.3% |
$262,654,623 |
| 7 |
No Reservations |
Warner Bros. |
$1,019,121 |
- 30.4% |
$25,194,324 |
| 8 |
Hot Rod |
Paramount |
$1,013,947 |
New |
$6,324,658 |
| 9 |
Transformers |
DreamWorks |
$934,830 |
- 38.8% |
$297,314,158 |
| 10 |
Ratatouille |
Walt Disney Pictures |
$755,599 |
- 29.0% |
$189,001,812 |
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Box office data supplied by Exhibitor Relations
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