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Wanted, a movie that is showing mediocre legs at best (it had the second largest drop out of yesterday's top ten after having the second largest drop on Monday as well), performed much worse. After an initial Monday of $6,381,750, it fell off the table with a massive 27.9% drop on Tuesday to $4,603,750. It did face the same Tuesday difficulties discussed with WALL-E above, but the reality is that its Tuesday drop was outrageous. Clearly, Hancock has this one beat and the same is true with The Incredible Hulk. After that title earned $6,010,405 on its first Monday, it fell 20.1% to $4,801,850 on its first Tuesday.

Even if we allow for the fact that Wanted and The Incredible Hulk are not the poster children for movie legs, the news is still positive for Sony. Hancock performed comparably well to WALL-E, Transformers and Iron Man and it easily exceeded the holdovers of Wanted and The Incredible Hulk in its first Tuesday. So, while you may be inclined to look at the overall top ten box office and note that it had the steepest drop by far, its percentage holdover results are still quite positive relative to other films of similar scale.

I know that a lot of you are quite interested in how WALL-E is doing. I am pleased to report that the answer is "exceptionally well". A lot of folks saw the percentage drop over the weekend and immediately assumed the title was in trouble. The reality is that weekend declines are less important to summer family films than is widely reported. Movies such as these make their money on the very weekdays of box office analyzed in this column. To wit, WALL-E's second weekend of $32,509,206 was a solid but unspectacular 48.5% decline from its debut of $63,087,526. But the movie really made a significant amount of its money during its first six weekdays. Including the aforementioned $4,415,537 Tuesday result, the latest Pixar release has now earned $40,520,385 in six weekdays. That's a total commensurate to 24.6% improvement over its most recent weekend result. It also represents roughly 30% of the film's entire domestic revenues earned to date. Don't be fooled by that silly little weekend decline number.

If you are having trouble wrapping your head around this idea that admittedly goes against a lot of the general preaching about movie income analysis, consider this. WALL-E's current total revenue of $136,117,014 domestically represents a dozen days of box office results. After the same time frame, here are some comparison numbers. Ratatouille was at $117,752,774 on its way to $206,445,654 in North American receipts. Cars was at $125,128,007 (almost exactly $11 million behind WALL-E) on its way to $244,082,982.

The Incredibles, a November release that would eventually earn $261,437,578, was at $147.4 million after 12 days. And the current $11.3 million gap that will be down to $6 million or so by Friday due to the huge discrepancies in weekday performances. The Incredibles earned $1.967 million on its 12th day as opposed to WALL-E's $4,415,437. This difference alone best represents why Pixar cleans up during the summer. Look at the dramatic difference in second weekday numbers between a July and a November blockbuster.

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