Daily Box Office Analysis for July 8, 2008

By David Mumpower

July 9, 2008

Don't be depressed about it, but these robots have more romance in their lives than you do.

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70% of Tuesday's top ten saw box office revenue increases over Monday results. 90% of Tuesday's top ten was either up or down 5% or less. Hancock was the other 10%. So, today's story pretty much writes itself.

After earning $8,481,615 on Monday, Hancock fell 12.5% on Tuesday to $7,423,215. Given the otherwise stellar performances of the other titles in the top ten, this is clearly troubling. Let's try to find some methods through which we may keep it in perspective. The first aspect I would like for you to keep in mind is that Hancock comprised 37.1% of the overall revenue for the top ten on Tuesday. Consider the difference in scale between it and the number two title in release, WALL-E, which earned only 60% of Hancock with a $4,415,437 Tuesday. We know from past experience that larger titles face steeper battles in terms of percentage depreciation. There are oftentimes tricks of mathematics used to misrepresent actual performance. In BOP's box office analysis, we strive to neutralize our evaluations in order to be as fair as possible to the titles. Clearly, Hancock had more to lose, as it were, from an $8.482 million Monday than its competitors did. So, is a 12.5% Monday/Tuesday decline really all that bad? Let's use some comparison movie data to determine this.

Let's use a set of five films as a basis for comparison to Hancock. The titles I have selected for this endeavor are WALL-E, Transformers, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Wanted. Iron Man is admittedly a bit arbitrary; I would have liked to have used Superman Returns instead. Unfortunately, that's title's first Tuesday is July 4th holiday-impacted, making it a poor example for our purposes. While Iron Man took place outside of summer, it still fits to a degree in terms of scale. It was a much larger opening weekend performer, but its initial Monday and Tuesday were $6,934,568 and $6,505,784, respectively. So, for our purposes, what we can take from this data is that Iron Man fell 6.2% from Monday to Tuesday. That's all we really need from it.




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In terms of the other titles, we documented just last week that WALL-E started with the best Pixar Monday ever, $8,913,286. This number was slightly enhanced by a Canadian holiday, making the decline of 14.7% to $7,601,082 a bit less troublesome than Hancock's 12.5% drop. Your mileage may vary on that evaluation if you don't think Canada's 8% impact on North American box office is significant enough to explain the difference in declines. So, for some of you reading this, the first two examples are not good ones. If you hold such an opinion, the next three are much more crucial to your evaluations.

Transformers earned $9,927,640 on its first full Monday of July 9, 2007 (remember that it did have 8 PM sneaks on July 2, 2007) then fell 16.9% to $8,253,776 on its first Tuesday. Factoring in the 17% difference in terms of Monday box office for the two titles, Transformers performed roughly similar to Hancock. So, I am already feeling better about the current number one film at the box office despite it being the only double digit decline in the top ten. And the news gets even better.


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