Michael Yun Xia

That's just a terrible number for The Lone Ranger, and with midnight accounting for so much of the opening day, it could struggle getting to $80m total, let alone $100m. $350m looks set for Despicable Me 2, with a chance at surpassing Iron Man 3 for the top film of the summer.

July 4th hadn't fallen on a Thursday since 2002, so we don't have much exact precedence to compare. However, Men in Black II did open on the same Wednesday that year. It had a OD-to-5-day multiplier of 4.69. I know it's sort of a different era then, especially in term of midnight, but I still don't see Despicable Me 2 having a worse multiplier. It's looking at $28m OD without midnight using RT's number; a 5.0 multiplier would give it $145m 5-day. Men in Black II had a OD-to-total multiplier of 10.24, and that's with bad WOM on a genre known for higher degree of frontloadedness. Transformers had $27.9m on its opening Tuesday, a 7/3 as well, and finished with $319m. I see DM2 beating that total.

Another thought: It's pretty amazing to look at this year's top grossing films - Avengers, TDKR, Hunger Games, and soon to be No. 4 Skyfall - and see how they all got good-to-great reviews and achieved their totals by not just huge openings but also healthy legs. There is no Transformers 2 or Spider-Man 3 on the list. If The Hobbit doesn't disappoint critically, we could be looking at the best top 5 ever. Heck, even Breaking Dawn Part 2 is regarded as the best of the series, even though that's not a high bar to reach.

It's crazy how good the quality of November films is this year, and we're rewarded with a record-setting month. It's always nice when that happens. The Oscar Best Picture will be down to Lincoln vs. Les Mes, but the competition below for the other nominations is just incredible, with Argo, Silver Lining Playbook, Life of Pi, Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Moonrise Kindom, Amour, The Impossible, and the un-reviewed yet Django Unchained and The Hobbit. Almost everything that people thought would be Oscar contenders turns out to not disappoint critically, and in many cases commercially.

Thanks, I'm getting back to follow the box office more closely now, but still won't be able to write much. November has definitely been a fun month to track though.

Life of Pi needs about a little over 4 multiplier from the three-day weekend to reach $100m. It won't have the benefit of theater expansion like Hugo did since it's already in much more locations, so I certainly don't expect a multiplier close to what Hugo had, but with good WOM, holiday season, and likely BP nomination, I do see it reaching the mark.

And the two local movies had holiday help to boost its multiplier, so yeah, not a great start for either.Still, it speaks to the volumn of how rapidly the market has expanded considering Avatar opened to just 33m yuan 2.5 years ago.

Tuesday is the discount day, so I'm expecting a slight increase from Monday w/o midnight.

Could be a repeat of the same weekend 4 years ago: http://www.boxoffice...wknd=36&p=.htm

Thanks. I would, but with the upcoming change in my life, it's likely I'll be disappearing from the forums altogether for a while in a month.

The signs were there though. The Flixster/RT ratings were especially telling for me, where it was in the 34-35K range on Thursday and didn't show much acceleration over the week. Thought it might struggle for a 1000 ratio.

A minor correction: my weekend predictions are already done on Thursday night, so the $204m number was before the midnight figure was known, although I did think $60m w/o midnight was still possible for Friday before realizing the impact the shooting had.

It's pretty remarkable how Nikki could still find space to sneak in a sentence to pad herself on the back: "yeah, I stayed up all Friday to 'report' on the shooting!" as if she was the only one doing it or she went beyond to do something she wasn't supposed to do. And her site does not track movie grosses; she gets the partial numbers from Rentrak and posts them after some deductions from her people.

1. Two original R-rated new releases combining for $90m;2. Four original films at the top of the box office, with $150m combined;3. We're looking at a $200m+ weekend while without having a single film over $60m, the first time ever.In a shorter sentence, what a weekend.Essentially we have a perfect combination: two R-rated movies that have as little overlap as possible in term of targeted audience (yes, there are still some overlap, but you can't get much better than this; combined, it pretty much covered all people over 17); a Pixar animated film, and then a TP film, all of which could happily live in the market place together.

If Brave will have the same Wed-to-weekend multiplier as Cars had on its 3rd week (so +1.2% Thurs, +55% Fri, 3.62 IM), it's looking at a $38m weekend.