New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Here is what I find noteworthy about May and June. We have already coincidentally discussed the best and worst weekdays of the month. Those were the Thursday before The Avengers and the Monday after the film debuted. The best weekday in June was the 26th. The top ten accumulated combined domestic revenue of $21,594,899. June 6th was the worst weekday during the month. Earnings on that day were $11,758,739.

What you will notice is that the combined depth of the top on the best June weekday almost compensated for the statistical outlier that inflated the best May weekday. Conversely, the worst June weekday is still double the worst May weekday. This is representative of better quality of the titles in release combined with more free time for consumers to watch the movies they wanted.

July is when the big bucks are earned. The best July weekday was the 3rd. The top ten combined to gross $62,410,071. Yes, this was holiday inflated since a lot of people take the entire week of July 4th as a vacation. If you believe this is an invalid comparison, we also must discard the $42,451,229 earned on July 5th. The next best July weekday would be the 24th with $28,905,436. The worst July weekday was the 19th with “only” $16,068,988.

August is when the money train rolls into the station. The best August weekday in 2012 was the 14th; combined top ten earnings were $17,880,585 on that day. The worst August day was yesterday. The entire top ten combined for a paltry $7,677,243. This is the first time that the ten films could reach a combined $10 million since May 3rd. And thus we have come full circle. We are back to pre-Avengers, pre-summer box office numbers overall.

Even by August standards, yesterday’s box office was quite grim. This is the second lowest box office total for an August weekday over the past four years. The total barely bests the worst weekday of August 31, 2011. On that day, the combined top ten earned $7,490,083. There is a very real chance that Thursday of this week falls far short of that total. In other words, we are going to have one of the worst end of summer box office weeks in recent memory.

This is great news for the people at Rocky Mountain Pictures. Their release, 2016: Obama’s America would ordinarily be a small fish in a big pond. Only seven days prior, $1.2 million would only have been good enough for seventh place behind the modest Disney release, The Odd Life of Timothy Green. On yesterday, that total was good enough to garner further headlines for the controversial documentary.

I will examine the box office behavior of what has become the only noteworthy subject in the top ten tomorrow. For now, what is important is that with the Republican National Convention in full swing this week and no quality releases in the offing, 2016: Obama’s America has a real chance to become the number one film in North America over the next three days.

Continued:       1       2