God Save the Screen
By Ash Wakeman
June 3, 2004
Big Numbers
It’s time to talk about some big numbers. Last weekend Roland Emmerich’s uber-disaster pic The Day After Tomorrow rolled into town with an impressive but not earth-shattering £7.3 million. I’m not going to compare it to the US numbers because here it wasn’t opening against a strong Shrek 2 second weekend and the holiday weekends (both in the US and in the UK, but we don’t count Monday in our numbers) make it all a little confusing.
That makes an opening of 15th all-time for The Day After Tomorrow, and it seems that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for non-franchise films to crack the top ten. At present, only Monsters, Inc. and Spider-Man make it into the top ten without being part of a trilogy. Monsters, Inc. will be dropping out next weekend and Spider-Man won’t last the summer (to be replaced by Shrek 2 or Spider-Man 2).
Below The Day After Tomorrow, the rest of the charts are fairly stagnant. At number two, Troy dropped a disappointing 60%, failing to remotely emulate the staying power of Gladiator. Van Helsing and Eternal Sunshine hang in there at three and four, but more for lack of competition than any other reason. A Pedro Almodovar film (Bad Education) in the top five for two weeks in a row? Forget global warning, there’s a sign of the apocalypse right there.
This stagnation allows Hum Tum, a Hindi re-imagining of When Harry Met Sally to creep in at number seven. But I don’t think anything indicates the lack of box office activity beyond the big three (Day After, Toy, Van Helsing) in May more than the fact that 50 First Dates has been in the top ten for eight weeks now.
Bigger Numbers
A couple of weeks ago I talked about the magic of Harry Potter and the Mysterious Seven-Day Weekend. Now I’m going to talk about it again. At the time, I neglected to mention that those four magical extra days included a public holiday on Monday and three school holiday weekends. This film was always going to be a box office juggernaut, but its opening “weekend” numbers are going to be something else.
Don’t forget that it doesn’t officially open until Friday, just as in the US it opens on June 4th. As always, the take for any previews (usually relatively insignificant) is tacked onto the opening weekend. Troy’s opening weekend, for example, had an extra £100,000 or so tacked on from a preview the week before.
On Monday, a public holiday and Potter’s first preview day, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban opened on 535 screens, over 100 more than The Day After Tomorrow. It took in £5.03 million. This is the biggest single-day take in UK Box Office history, well ahead of the Chamber of Secrets' £4 million opening Saturday. This puts it at number 37 on the biggest opening weekend charts, and it’s still got another three days to go before it even gets to that weekend.
On Tuesday, the first day of the mid-term school holidays, The Prisoner of Azkaban raked in an additional £3.5 million or so, the fifth highest day in history for a two-day total of around eight and a half million. This makes it the number 12 opener of all-time and it hasn’t even opened yet.
Wednesday and Thursday will add to these “preview” figures. Even conservative estimates would put it well inside the top ten, probably at number eight. So Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban will have had the eighth largest opening of all time in the UK before its opening weekend begins. An impressive feat of conjuration - five points for Gryffindor.
We’ll have to wait until the dust settles next weekend to see the final number, but there seems little doubt it will beat Chamber of Secrets' £18.8 million to become the number one opener ever. This will leave the 1, 2 and 3 in the Potter franchise at 3, 2 and 1 on the UK opener charts respectively. That's quite an achievement, but when four days of previews puts it at number eight in the charts before the starter’s gun is fired, we’re not really talking an even playing field here.
To be fair, it’s not just the Potters. The Return of the King (current number three), The Two Towers (number four) and Matrix Reloaded (number five) all profited from considerable preview days as well. For big-ticket releases in the UK, it’s become the norm. If you want your film to be on the news Monday morning as breaking any kind of record you really need to frontload your numbers in this way now. It seems unlikely anything will ever be able to crack the top five without at least a couple of well placed preview days.
It’s a bit of a false economy, though. I really wonder how they are going to maintain the momentum for future Potter releases when the bar is set this high. A public holiday, three days of school holidays and a full weekend. You really have to wonder at the validity of opening weekend numbers as box office indicators.
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