Sunday, July 10, 2011

Box Office Round Up: The Calm Before Harry Potter

Pictured:  People not waiting in line for Zookeeper

Nothing too crazy at the box-office this weekend. Just the highest grossing movie of the year.

Transformers 3 was number one for the second week in a row. It made $47 million, which is about a 50% drop from last weekend. However, it is more than Transformers 2 made in its second weekend, which saw a much sharper drop-off. With this, T3 surpassed the Hangover 2 for the highest grossing film of the year domestically with $261,000,000. Worldwide, it is up to $645 million, good enough for 50th all-time. Not too bad for twelve days.

Number two was Horrible Bosses with $28 million. While that is a very good amount, it is a little bit off from the Bad Teacher opening weekend, despite Horrible Bosses over-(star)powering that 9-1. I got to watch this and man did I love it. Each actor simply nailed their roles, and the entire theater was ROFLing the entire way through. Very diverse audience too, for what it's worth.

There are a few thing I especially liked about how this was handled. All three leads got perfectly equal screen time.  This was the first comedy I have seen in awhile that had no straight-up gross-out humor. I mean, most comedies these days would gone into great detail with the toothbrush scene. And also, the movie never has a turn for the serious. It's a comedy all the way through. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, too many flicks go overboard anymore. If this was a Judd Apatow film, it would have had a scene like this:

Charlie: Man, I can't wait to kill our bosses.
Jason: You know... I've been thinking
(Indy music starts to play)  
Jason: We hate our bosses, but they are just doing what they need to do to get a paycheck. They are just like us.
(...Where you go?)
Jason: We shouldn't be hating our bosses. We need to reach out to them. We need to love our bosses.
(SO WHAT IF YOU CATCH ME! WHERE WOULD WE LAND!)

It just doesn't fit in every movie.

Number three was Paul Blart: Zookeeper with only $21 million on a $80 million (!!!) budget. With that kind of money, they must have actually taught real animals how to talk. The movie's failure was due in part to PETA protesting it, this not being released in the middle of a drought like Mall Cop, and the fact that the trailers don't even mention that Adam Sandler plays a monkey. But lets not point the blame. People didn't see this because it sucks.

Cars was 4th with $15m/$148m US LTD. Bad Teacher was 5th with $9m/$79m LTD. Some other crap was after that. Midnight in Paris was 12th with $38m life to date, becoming Woody Allen's highest grossing film ever (but keep in mind when stuff like Annie Hall was being released, the average movie ticket price was about 35 cents). And Green Lantern was number nine, earning $3 million or 1/100th of its budget. It sits at $143m worldwide, and it is only down to two showings at my big theater (neither of which are at night). Dark Knight Rising can't come out soon enough for Warner Bros.
  

7 comments:

  1. hangover 2, that is a lot of cash

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  2. need to watch transformers 3 soon! :/

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  3. There's a lot of shocking stats here.

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  4. Loved Horrible Bosses too.

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  5. Pretty keen to watch Transformers 3 :O

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  6. i love that megan fox is gone!
    i LOVE that new girl!

    New outfit post - New Blouse!
    www.mirfashion.blogspot.com

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  7. I'm curious if there'll be any backlash for Harry Potter after the atrocious Pt.1

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