Friday Box Office Analysis
By Tim Briody
May 12, 2007
BoxOfficeProphets.com
From record-shattering to a drastic fall to earth. Spider-Man 3 came in on Friday with $17 million. For those scoring at home (or even if you're by yourself), that's a 70.6% decrease from the record-breaking single day number of $58 million. While it's still going to take the weekend easily ($17 million is considerably higher than the number two film will earn over the whole weekend), this is a serious red alert. The decline will improve a bit since last Saturday's take was behind Friday's by several million, mostly due to midnight and even 3-4 a.m. showings, so we should go back to seeing a traditional Saturday uptick.
How much of one, though, remains to be seen. It needs a minimum of a 3.0 multiplier this weekend to avoid the unprecedented $100 million decline, which it's very likely to do, though it should still set the record for most amount of business lost in a weekend. My favorite stat in all of this is that it does not tie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Spider-Man 2 and Revenge of the Sith in reaching the $200 million mark in eight days. It will instead need a ninth, despite having a $13 million head start over Dead Man's Chest.
I'm being very conservative and giving Spider-Man 3 a 3.4 multiplier for its second weekend, which would give it $57.8 million, still an impressive number. Still, it is clearly not long for this world, especially with Shrek the Third due next weekend. The best case scenario is the 3.59 internal multiplier that Spider-Man had. If the new film were able to achieve that feat, it would earn $60.9 million this weekend and everyone would feel better about its long-term propositions.
28 Weeks Later
As we move on to another disappointing crop of opening movies, 28 Weeks Later leads the way. The sequel to the 2003 horror hit 28 Days Later earned $3.8 million, pretty much identical to the $3.4 million 28 Days Later made nearly four years ago. About equally well-received so far, a multiplier similar to the 2.95 28 Days Later earned seems right. Give it about $11 million for the weekend.
Georgia Rule
The Lindsay Lohan/Felicity Huffman/Jane Fonda daughter/mother/grandmother movie was more notable for Ms. Lohan being scolded for partying during its production than anything else, including its box office. $1.9 million was all Georgia Rule could muster on Friday, and $6 million is pretty much the ceiling here.
Delta Farce
Sadly, also making the top ten is Delta Farce, from two of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour guys (Bill Engvall, you actually deserve better). Fortunately, it only earned $1.1 million, well below the $2.3 million opening day of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, so hopefully his film-making career is over (except for voiceover work). I figure around $3.1 million for the weekend.
The Ex
Lastly, we have The Ex, earning only $500,000 on its 1,000 screens on Friday. Zach Braff, you might want to keep that steady paycheck from Scrubs for a little bit longer if you're going to have box office performances like The Last Kiss and this one. Really, about $1.6 million or so is what can realistically be expected here.