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The story remains The Bourne Ultimatum as we examine top ten box office for Tuesday, August 7, 2007. The news is not particularly good, though. After starting out with a respectable $9.132 million on Monday, Matt Damon's latest offering falls 18.2% to $7,466,400 yesterday. If we have learned nothing else over the past ten weeks of daily box office discussion (and we probably haven't...other than that the gorno movie phase is so 2005), it is that films should not plummet that much from Monday to Tuesday.

If you need proof of this, let's go back to our lovely comparisons models once more. They are our friends. Our first friend is not Chandler or Monica and the television ratings show it sure as hell ain't Joey. No, it's Transformers, the July 4th week release that helped power July of 2007 into being the largest box office month ever recorded...by $145 million. That's 12.5% better than we have ever seen before, folks. Digressing for a moment, we had previously seen the second largest May and the fourth largest June ever, meaning that the summer of 2007 is every bit as good as had been predicted at the start of the year. Three of the top 18 monthly box office totals ever have happened since May 1st. Like I said at the end of yesterday's column, it's a good time to be in the movie business.

Circling back to the point, Transformers as well as the other huge July release, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, showed fine legs relative to their $70 million opening weekends. They are excellent gauging tools for what a title should earn on weekdays in order to wind up with fantastic final box office totals. Meanwhile, The Simpsons Movie works in reverse of them, proving itself to be the perfect model for front-loaded titles. I have been promising BOP's Michael Bentley that I will do a calculation of its final box office for a bit now, and I will try to work that into a column later on this week. Suffice it to say that for a $74 million opener, it's not going to be pretty. The Bourne Ultimatum wants to avoid that fate, although we are honestly splitting hairs in arguing that any $70 million opener's success is in question. All four of the titles in question are box office juggernauts.

Having acknowledged all of that, here is today's important data. Transformers fell from $9,927,640 on its first Monday to $8,253,776 on its second Tuesday (remember that it officially debuted on a Tuesday). This is a decline of 16.9%, a pretty stiff fall early in its release pattern, particularly given how well the title has held up since then. Transformers is still in the top ten on this, its 36th day of release, with $828,059, good enough for ninth place yesterday.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix outperformed Transformers in terms of Monday-Tuesday decline. The latest J.K. Rowling adaptation fell from $10,415,480 on its first Monday to $9,169,473 on its first Tuesday, a drop of only 12.0%. Given how well it held up at the start, I am rather disappointed in how Potter's latest adventure has played out from there. Yesterday's $1,424,156 gives it a running total of $264,078,779.

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