Spider-Man 3 box office update…

Amazingly, the final weekend figures are actually very slightly higher than the earlier estimates. Spider-Man drew $151.1 million, for an incredible $35,540 dollars per screen. Wow! It’s worldwide totals for the first six days of its release (it came out a tad earlier in some oversea venues) is $382 million. Again, in *six* days.

Disney, hoping to help the third Pirates movie come as close to this figure as possible (or, in their wildest dreams, beating it) for PR purposes, has asked theater owners not to start playing their movie on midnight Thursday night–i.e., the exact minute ‘Friday’ begins, as Spider-Man 3 did–but to start it at 8:00 on Thursday night, thus giving them a bit of a head start. We’ll see if that works, but expect this sort of chicanery to continue as long as box office totals continue to be such widely reported new.

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Sardu

Yeesh- if Disney gets away with that next thing you know “opening weekend” will run 5 days, Thursday through Monday. On second thought, more power to them. Maybe if the whole opening weekend BO becomes a joke people will stop worrying about it. It’s silly that a movie’s fate can be determined by how well the hype machine works and gets curious people out for that first showing. Witness the failure of Grindhouse ; we need to go back to the oldschool slow rollout of Borat. I would love to see how a POC would do opening on 300 screens and building based on its actual merit.
Ken HPoJ

The market’s too far gone for that, especially for films that have 300 million dollar production budgets. Individual theater auditoriums are smaller, but there are a lot more screens now, because of the megaplex thing. Everyone who wants to see a film in the first week now basicaly can, and if you miss one showing, there’s another in twenty minutes.

I don’t know if people decide to see movies based on how much money it makes, I think it’s just part and parcel with the general interest in movies and the fact that more information is available now. To that extent, I think it’s a harmless diversion, and certainly less annoying and or dangerous than our culture’s interest in the private lives of actors and other such celebrities. (Ranging from the constant coverage of their ‘romantic’ lives to anyone having even the slightest interest in the ‘political’ thoughts of actors and singers.)
KeithB

Yeah, I used to be lucky living abbout 30 minutes away from Hollywood and Westwood. We got to see all the movies first, several weeks before all the rest of you.

I got to see Star Wars on its opening weekend, and waitid in line all day to do it.

I also saw “Apocalypse Now” during its initial run at the Cinerama Dome. There were no credits, you got handed a booklet on the way out.

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