Friday Box Office Analysis
By Tim Briody
May 31, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The tidal wave of estrogen (and a few unfortunate male souls) that swept over movie theaters yesterday resulted in a Friday take of $26.9 million for the movie adaptation of Sex and the City. This is just an absolutely phenomenal single day total. Hilariously, this is more than [tm:831_]Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull[/tm] made on its opening day. BOP highly encourages you to use this information to win a few bar bets.
There has been considerable internal discussion among the BOP staff about what Sex and the City's weekend multiplier would be. Two examples of TV shows making the leap to the big screen that we used for comparison were last year's The Simpsons Movie and 1998's (really?) The X-Files: Fight the Future. The Simpsons had a 2.4 from Friday-to-Sunday, while X-Files was a slightly similar 2.38. Both of those indicate a strong Friday, but then a steep decline over the remainder of the weekend.
BOP was believing something similar to that, perhaps even lower. What makes us nervous, however, is online ticket seller Fandango reporting over 1,000 sold out showings, and this perhaps will create some spillover into the remainder of the weekend. We're playing it safe, however, and going with the trusty 2.4, which still translates into a fantastic $63.6 million weekend.
[tm:2042_]The Strangers[/tm]
All right, this one is probably a bigger surprise than Sex and the City. Horror film du jour The Strangers opened to a pretty darn solid $7.6 million on Friday. For something effectively thrown to the wolves, this is impressive. However, standard horror film rules will apply here and it's looking at a weekend total of about $20 million - which is still really good.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Falling 60% from last Friday to $12.3 million is the fourth Indiana Jones film. This is to be expected, as there was absolutely zero chance for it to even come close to duplicating last weekend's amazing but also holiday-inflated figures. I'm figuring a significant improvement on Saturday, but without the benefit of the Monday holiday, the Sunday figure suffers and an approximate 60% decline for the three-day weekend is where Indy ends up. Call it a weekend of $40.2 million as it passes the $200 million mark.