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Another day, another batch of dollars for Scarlett Johansson. Yes, Lucy finished in first place for the fifth consecutive day and yes, this will be the case today and tomorrow as well. Actually, Guardians of the Galaxy will be the number one film on Thursday, but its box office will be grafted into its Friday total as has become the norm in the mega-opening weekend era. So, Lucy will enjoy a seven day run as champion before getting eviscerated on the first day of August. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Yesterday, Lucy earned another $5.4 million, bringing its five day total to $54.3 million. A $40 million production that averages almost $11 million per day at the start of its run is doing really, really well. That is the type of profit that even a Hollywood accountant will struggle to hide on the balance sheet.

Meanwhile, Hercules performed slightly better by increasing 13% on Tuesday in comparison to Lucy’s 10%. In the process, The Rock’s Muscles grossed another $3.8 million, giving the film a running total of $36.9 million domestically, $65.6 million globally. By Sunday, it should start to look like a profitable film, even if the reality is that it will need another month to reach its breakeven point in actuality. Either way, both movies released last weekend are box office winners. Our strange summer of profitable but largely unsexy films continues, the physiques of Scarlett Johansson and The Rock notwithstanding.

Tuesday’s box office behavior was right in line with every other Tuesday this summer. Every single film in the top ten increased from Monday. This is not new behavior, something you know from reading this column for a couple of months now. Let’s examine the phenomenon a bit to demonstrate how universal the behavior is.

Not including the week of July 4th, top ten films have increased from Monday to Tuesday an astounding 69 times out of 70. The lone exception was The Fault in Our Stars during its first week in theaters. How steep was that film’s Monday-Tuesday decline? 2%. Yes, we are exactly 2% away from a clean sweep of 70 for 70 in terms of Tuesday increases during non-holiday weeks.

Why did I exclude the week of July 4th? As I stated at the time, holiday behavior varies depending on the calendar configuration for the American celebration of Independence Day. In 2014, the holiday occurred on a Friday, reducing the incentive of consumers to watch a movie on a Tuesday. Conversely, some people scheduled vacations for the entire week, inflating Monday’s box office. The result of this behavior was that five out of the top ten films fell from Monday to Tuesday, although none of them declined by more than 6%. In other words, Monday and Tuesday were virtually identical. To wit, the difference in composite revenue for the top ten each day was less than $300,000.

If not for that odd calendar snafu and the early front-loading of the John Green adaptation, we would have a clean sweep of Tuesday increases. This is why I was so confident at the start of the summer about daily box office patterns. They are stunningly consistent.

Daily Box Office for July 29, 2014
Rank	Film	Distributor	Daily Gross (in $)	Daily Decline	Total Gross (in $)
1	Lucy	Universal	5,441,695	+ 10%	54,308,355
2	Hercules	Paramount	3,780,503	+ 13%	36,918,283
3	Dawn of the Planet of the Apes	20th Century Fox	2,506,840	+ 13%	177,174,377
4	The Purge: Anarchy	Universal	1,657,815	+ 9%	55,043,270
5	Planes: Fire and Rescue	Walt Disney Co.	1,644,614	+ 10%	38,491,720
6	Sex Tape	Sony	1,033,342	+ 19%	28,852,295
7	And So It Goes	Paramount	764,302	+ 33%	5,983,278
8	Transformers: Age of Extinction	Clarius Enertainment	751,426	+ 12%	237,875,634
9	Tammy	Warner Bros.	518,288	+ 14%	79,175,734
10	How to Train Your Dragon 2	20th Century Fox	491,311	+ 13%	166,590,551