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Transformers: Age of Extinction, the movie hated on general principle as well as actual execution, continued its reign as the number one film in North America yesterday. Whether anybody outside of Paramount Studios is happy about this is up for debate. Wherever you stand on the topic – and odds are tremendous that you are angry about it – you should get used to it. The latest Michael Bay offering is going to be number one for many days to come.

A box office total of $10.5 million is the result for Transformers 4. How good a total that is depends entirely upon your perspective. All three previous franchise flicks were released in the same general vicinity around the July 4th American holiday. None of them were released on an actual Friday. There is absolutely no useful data that can be used to extrapolate yesterday’s performance. Even worse, the week of July 4th is in and of itself a nightmare with regards to box office behavior.

Those of you who are newcomers to movie numbers analysis will be surprised to learn that when the July 4th holiday falls on a weekend, it hurts rather than helps movies in release. This exception is in direct conflict to the box office law that any holiday artificially inflates box office results. When consumers have vacation days, they spend their free time in myriad ways, but movie going remains an economical way to enjoy the holiday. July 4th on a Friday or Saturday is just the opposite since those days would have been spent in theaters anyway. Instead, there is competition for free time as people visit family, enjoy barbecues or watch fireworks displays.

If you were wondering why Transformers: Age of Extinction was released last Friday instead of the upcoming one, this is your explanation. To that point, a previous Michael Bay film fell victim to this quirk of calendar configuration. Armageddon was the prohibitive favorite to win the box office year of 1998. Bay’s movie (hilariously) had Oscar buzz as well as tremendous consumer anticipation. Its first day in theaters was a Wednesday, and the Pearl Harbor tale opened to $9.7 million. On July 3, 1998, a Friday, it improved to $13.6 million. When Armageddon fell 23% to $10.5 million on Saturday, barely beating its first day total, critics assailed the film without understanding the underlying mechanics of its box office behavior. Far be it from me to stop people from picking on Michael Bay productions, but that particular instance was nonsense.

Perhaps gunshy after a previous slight, Bay convinced Paramount Pictures to debut their prize 2014 release the week before Independence Day. This way, Transformers: Age of Extinction will receive a moderately inflated box office total on Thursday and potentially even earlier weekdays. In this manner, they can counteract the negative impact of its July 4th Friday box office. Then again, if it keeps making hundreds of millions of dollars in China, they can live with a single digits Friday, modest Chinese revenue splits be damned.

I say all of this because this will be the topic of note for our weekday box office discussions from now until the holiday. Everything is skewed and a bit difficult to project. Suffice to say that if Michael Bay haters want to relish a disappointing run for Transformers 4, they will be forced to focus upon domestic revenue. From that perspective, the news will be quite good. After four days in theaters, Age of Extinction has grossed $110.5 million, assuming we believe the $100 million actual reported Sunday (spoiler: we don’t).

Transformers: Dark of the Moon had already grossed $132.2 million by that point and the gap will only expand tomorrow. The third Transformers film gained another $30.4 million on its fifth day in theaters; Age of Extinction will probably fall in the range of $12-$13 million. Despite this, I expect the new Transformers movie to surpass the total global take of its predecessor. What it has done internationally without the benefit of several major markets boggles my mind. We will spend the rest of the week monitoring its progress while also updating some other titles.