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The Amazing Spider-Man won the domestic box office battle yesterday, yet the news was once again less than glowing for Sony Pictures. Spider-Man fell for the second consecutive day, earning $15.8 million. This is a stiff decline of 33% from yesterday’s $23.4 million. In only two days, the title has fallen from $35.9 million (including midnight screenings) to $15.8 million.

I mentioned in the most recent column that as long as the movie approached its $23.4 million July 4th performance, there would be no reason to panic. Instead, it has fallen roughly the same percentage as Transformers did with the same calendar configuration in 2007. The difference is that Transformers was dealing with much larger numbers of $29.1 million on July 4th and $19.2 million on July 5th. A movie with smaller numbers should have a better percentage hold. The fact that Spider-Man did not is troubling.

Overall, the easiest way to evaluate its Thursday performance is to remember that the Sony estimated the movie’s Monday midnight exhibition revenue as $8.4 million (remember that a phantom $900,000 was announced yesterday). Thursday’s total is not even double this amount for a full day. At this point, The Amazing Spider-Man has demonstrated all of the tell-tale signs of frontloading.

Will the movie recover some this weekend? Of course. It should increase somewhere between 15% and 30% today, which would indicate box office in the range of $18 million to $20.5 million. Higher wouldn’t even shock me. Still, we would be looking at a realistic weekend total of $60-$65 million. Even if The Amazing Spider-Man spikes huge and winds up at $70 million, The Avengers will have still effectively tripled its opening weekend as well as earned more in three days than The Amazing Spider-Man will in ten days.

Perhaps you believe I am being unfair in comparing The Avengers, another Marvel property, to The Amazing Spider-Man. In that case, I will amend the comparison to Spider-Man 3, a franchise killer of a movie that still earned more in three days than The Amazing Spider-Man will earn in six plus days. And these numbers are predicated upon giving the fourth Spider-Man movie the benefit of the doubt.

Realistically, the Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone reboot has already earned somewhere between 50 and 60% of its six day take. If we split the difference, that’s a six-day total of $135 million. If the movie continues to disappoint, we could be discussing a total of as little as $125 million. And this brings us to sunny point number two. Transformers managed only a 2.05 final box office multiplier, which means that it barely doubled its first six days in theaters during its entire domestic run.

As unbelievable as this may seem, we can already safely range the final domestic box office total of The Amazing Spider-Man as capped around $250-$270 million using only the data we have on hand thus far. There is obviously some play in these estimates depending upon exactly what happens this weekend. We have a good idea of what to expect, though. And that’s the ceiling.

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