Sunday, May 25, 2008

Indiana Jones 4 gets $126 million

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Weekend Box Office
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1. Indiana Jones 4 - $101 million ($126) - 1 wk (Par)
4260 screens / $23,708 per screen
2. Prince Caspian - $23.03 ($91.08) - 2 wks (BV) -58.2%
3929 / $5862
3. Iron Man - $20.15 ($252.31) - 4 wks (Par) -36.7%
3915 / $5146
4. What Happens in Vegas - $9 ($54.25) - 3 wks (Fox) -35.2%
3188 / $2823
5. Speed Racer - $4 ($36.21) - 3 wks (WB) -50.7%
3112 / $1285
6. Made of Honor - $3.4 ($39.06) - 4 wks (Sony) -27.7%
2393 / $1420
7. Baby Mama - $3.32 ($52.13) - 5 wks (U) -29%
2158 / $1539
8. Forgetting Sarah Marshall - $1.67 ($58.2) - 6 wks (U) -40.2%
1078 / $1545

Indy is off to a slightly better start than Iron Man, but when all is said and done, I don't see it finishing too far ahead of it, money-wise. Iron Man's word-of-mouth has been tremendous, and Indy's is good in a lower-your-expectations-and-it's-fun kind of way. Either way, both are making Paramount Pictures a ton o' money this summer.

I expect Prince Caspian's decline to slow down, as nothing is opening for kids next week. I just finished re-reading it and based on the marketing, I'd say its problems are two-fold: 1) There's only one battle in the book, at the end, and it's not that big, but the preview makes it look like an epic Helm's Deep 20-minute battle a la Lord of the Rings, and it didn't need to go dark in the second Narnia movie. Harry Potter waited until the third movie to go there. 2) Caspian has one of the weakest plots of the Narnia series. It's 200 pages. The four kids go back to Narnia on page 2. After 20-ish pages of hiking around, trying to figure out what year it is, they meet a dwarf, who then spends over 50 pages telling them the backstory of Caspian. They don't actually meet him until around page 140, and then they're gearing up for the confrontation with King Miraz, Caspian's uncle and thief of the throne.

(Numbers from http://www.boxofficemojo.com)

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