Chrestomanci

Hmm . . .1938 - Spencer Tracy - Boys Town1939 - Robert Donat - Goodbye, Mr. Chips1940 - Jimmy Stewart - The Philadelphia Story1948 - Laurence Olivier - Hamlet1956 - Yul Brynner - The King and I1964 - Rex Harrison - My Fair Lady1965 - Lee Marvin - Cat Ballou1966 - Paul Scofield - A Man For All Seasons1977 - Richard Dreyfuss - The Goodbye Girl2010 - Colin Firth - The King's SpeechSo only 10, I guess (though there are several more -- Forrest Gump, Gandhi and Amadeus at least -- that I know I've seen at least part of, but I'm not sure I've seen the whole movie). Funny, how most of them are older movies; that gap between 1977 and 2010 looks really odd. There's a pretty good chance I will see this year's winner, since I've already seen TTSS and Moneyball and I'm planning to see The Descendants and The Artist at some point. But if Bichir wins, I guess I'm out of luck. In general, though, I haven't done all that much better at seeing nominees than winners; I'd guess that I've seen at least one nominee most years from 1934 on, but there are still plenty of years that I haven't even seen any of the nominees for. If I do manage to see both The Artist and The Descendants, I'm pretty sure this will be the first year I've seen 4 of 5 nominees, though there are a few years for which I've seen 3 of 5 nominees.

Well, I really don't know where it came from, because the actual is in now on boxoffice.com and that isn't it. Contraband seems to have done $24,349,815 for the 3-day and $28,515,480 for the 4-day. There are several other actuals in on boxoffice.com now, which I don't have time to post, but you can find the 3-day numbers at this link.

I'm not doubting you, but where did you find this on boxoffice.com? I've looked everywhere I could think of and can't spot it.ETA: Never mind, I found it. It's still listed among the estimates, though, and they haven't updated the Contraband page.

First of all, it hasn't actually happened yet. They are predicting that it will happen. And there is a reason that they are predicting it: many family movies increase on the Monday of MLK weekend. So even if it does happen, unless it's a really big increase, it isn't actually that amazing.

For the 3-day, yes. I was afraid they were being too optimistic with that 8% Sunday drop.

We have. They're up on BOM -- 4-day and revised 3-day.

I'm amazed that Contraband did that well, but I guess that I shouldn't be -- it has been nearly a month since the relases of MI4 and SH2, after all, so action audiences were probably hungry for something new. Well, they should get their fill over the next few weeks.I do wish Beauty and the Beast had done better, since I think it's really a much better movie than The Lion King, but it still did quite respectably. I'm afraid the 3-day number will drop with the next set of estimates tomorrow, though -- that 8.3% Sunday drop seems highly optimistic. But, hey, if TLK could manage a 22% drop on a non holiday weekend, maybe it's not out of the question after all.Joyful Noise did fine for what it is.MI4 and SH2 are still holding well, but I admit that I was hoping for slightly better holds from both. Apart from each other, they've had pretty much a clear field for the action-adventure audience since they opened -- I don't think War Horse, TGWTDT and TTSS fit into quite the same category or appeal to quite the same audience, though I'm sure there is some overlap. I'm glad, though not surprised, that Contraband didn't hurt them too badly, but with the next two weeks featuring six movies which can be categorized as action in one way or another, I'm afraid the late legs won't be quite as good.And it's really too bad that TTSS couldn't hold better. I suspect the culprit there was a combination of Iron Lady and Contraband (probably more the former than the latter). It makes me sad, though, since TTSS is easily one of my favorite movies of last year.

I wonder why there are no numbers for TTSS.

I doubt it will hit either of them too badly, especially since it's R rated.

No, Haywire's next weekend. This weekend is B&tB 3D, Contraband, and Joyful Noise. And it will be the wide opening weekend for Iron Lady.

If it followed Hostel's daily increases and decreases, it would wind up with about $7.3M for the 3-day weekend, a drop of around 78%. But if you look at The Unborn, which is probably closer in terms of type of horror, that had Friday increases of about 300% early in its run. While I think the R rating and poor WOM will keep TDI from hitting those heights, I do think there is a chance that the Friday increase for TDI will be bigger than Hostel's, which might allow it to narrowly avoid a 75% drop.

Further boxoffice.com numbers:WH - $760,594 (-10%)Tintin - $368,558 (-5%)Muppets - $66,922 (-2%)

Not quite. Alvin 3 and The Muppets also dropped only 2%.ETA: And Hugo was up 6% to $127,577, PiB up 4% to $33,617 and Sitter flat at $98,273.

MI4 - $1,321,322 (-3%)SH2 - $1,052,195 (-5%)TGWTDT - $1,002,549 (-7%)TDI - $863,014 (-9%)NYE - $187,094 (-2%)TDH - $174,157 (-4%)BD1 - $107,256 (-5%)TTSS - $437,424 (-6%)

More actuals from boxoffice.com:MI4 - $1,701,316 (+32%)TGWTDT - $1,254,975 (+33%)WH - $983,968 (+46%)Tintin - $538,594 (+38%)TDH - $216,582 (+16%)BD1 - $125,923 (+16%)Muppets - $70,737 (+3%)Artist - $135,410 (+32%)

According to boxoffice.com, SH2 made $1,343,458 on Tuesday, up 28%, and TDI made $1,403,607, up 1%. Guess we'll have to wait at least one more day for TDI to fall behind SH2.

Fox movies are starting to come in on boxoffice.com. First up, WBaZ - $640,931 (+38%). Between that and MI4, looks like we could be seeing some huge increases.ETA: Then again . . . Alvin 3 only increased 8% to $403,296.Some more actuals:TTSS - $507,379 (+26%)Descendants - $299,635 (+56%)Sitter - $118,383 (+19%)Shame - $35,443 (+43%)

The only really big drops are Alvin and Muppets, though. The rest had drops in basically the same range as the 2006 films and that's despite most movies (with the notable exception of The Muppets) having Tuesday decreases at worst similar to and often rather better than comparable films in 2006. I was really expecting bigger drops after yesterday. And, in fact, even the drops for The Muppets and Alvin aren't far off from the 31% and 37% drops of Cheaper By the Dozen 2 and Yours, Mine and Ours, respectively, on the same day in 2006.The drops for the movies in fewer theaters seem to have been smaller than those in 1000+ theaters:Descendants - $340,267 (-8%)Artist - $175,319 (-2%)MWwM - $137,727 (-4%)HF2 - $51,239 (-19%)TTSS actually had a small increase, apparently, up 2% to $121,597.

Yes, I gathered that you had just ignored it initially. But then you took the effort to second the complaint. So because you don't want to "toggle and scan" just once, you want everyone else to have to use the full or almost full title of every movie every time? I'd guess at least 95% of the people on the site (and more if you narrow it down to the people who actually care) can follow the abbreviations for current release movies just fine. And sure it doesn't take too much time or effort to type up one full title once, but having to do it for every movie title in every post you write would add up pretty quickly, even if you aren't a slower typer. So I'd say the weight of inconvenience in making a few people check what an abbreviation stands for once is significantly lower than forcing everyone else on the site to type out the full title of that movie every time they need to use it.

While I agree that using abbreviations for older movies that aren't already referenced in a discussion is frustrating, I see no reason why abbreviations should not be used when the reference is clear or easily identified. This is a daily numbers thread, so clearly the abbreviation refers to a film currently in release and it isn't that difficult to look at, say, the previous weekend's chart on BOM to scan for what matches the abbreviation. If you're too lazy to do that, that's your problem. Frankly, if you can't identify a current movie in the daily numbers thread by its abbreviation, it's probably not a movie you care about anyway, so why not just ignore it.

The Muppets had the biggest drop of any movie posted on boxoffice.com so far, down 73% to $277,177. It's not entirely surprising, since it was way up on Monday, but HF2 also had a big Monday increase and didn't drop nearly as badly. It'll be interesting to see what happens to Arthur Christmas, since that had the biggest Monday increase of all the wide releases.ETA:boxoffice.com just posted AC's Tuesday number and it was down only 54% to $115,478.

boxoffice.com has the Warner Bros. movies now:SH2 - $2,558,120 (-57%)NYE - $606,315 (-52%)HF2 - $63,410 (-60%)ETA: Guess I was a little slow again, LOL.

Also:TDH - $587,176 (-46%)Sitter - $301,037 (-40%)BD1 - $299,396 (-50%)TTSS - $118,994 (-63%)The drops are interesting. Most of the wide releases in 2006 dropped between 60% and 70% and those that didn't still dropped above 55%. I wonder if this is the effect of discount Tuesday or if there is something else going on here.

This may look better as the actuals come in. For the movies with actuals up on boxoffice.com as of now, it looks like Monday was generally underestimated. For instance, Alvin 3 actually increased 11.8% on Monday and was only projected to increase 3.3%. WBaZ had a projected 14.3% decrease, but instead dropped just 3.1%. ETA: I may have spoken too soon, The Sitter apparently had a terrible drop on Monday -- nearly 30%. I'm hoping that's an isolated case. The Darkest Hour also had a bad drop, but it was expected to and, in fact, didn't drop nearly as much as projected -- its Monday number was higher than estimated even though it's Sunday number was a fair bit lower than estimated.

I think "north of 285" might be a bit of a stretch at this point. After it's 6th week, NM would go on to make another $12.1M. BD1 would pretty much need to match that to get over $285M and I just don't see it happening. It's already going to have lost further ground on NM this weekend.