Chrestomanci

Nikki has Saturday estimates up now for the top 8:MI4 - $8.7MSH2 - $6.2MWH - $5.6M (an increase from Friday!!!)Alvin 3 - $4.8MWBaZ - $4.8MTGWTDT - $4.2MTintin - $3.3MNYE - $2.2MThe drops for MI4 and SH2 are basically in line with KK from 2005. Alvin's drop looks pretty harsh, over 30% -- none of the family films in 2005 dropped nearly that hard. WBaZ barely dropped at all, as did NYE (though that's more expected, given the name of the movie). Tintin's drop of about 25% is neither especially good nor really bad.But the real news here is War Horse. That's an increase of almost 20%. Among wide releases, only The Producers and Walk the Line increased on New Year's Eve in 2005, and they both increased less than 10%.

No, it dropped from 14.6 to 9.6. 16.7 may have been the studio projection for Monday before any actual results came in, but the revised estimate delivered yesterday was significantly lower. So the Tuesday drop was only 34%, which is about what one would expect and therefore just fine. And it's still making nearly $10M, so I can see why someone would say it was fantastic.ETA: LOL, I type too slowly.

Of the top 12 films in 2005, only Cheaper By the Dozen 2 saw a small increase, while most of the movies decreased between about 5% and 10%. I'd guess that decreases this year should still be fairly small, but may be bigger than in 2005 due to the increase in discount Tuesdays.ETA:Having thought about what I wrote for a couple of minutes, I'm actually second guessing it now. It's the holidays and people are going to go to the movies anyway, so discount Tuesday might actually have hurt the box office yesterday. In which case, Wednesday might in fact see better holds than in 2005.

I wouldn't say that it's likely at this point, but people wrote off the possibility completely much too soon and there is still a slim chance. Consider that of the 2005 films SH2's Sunday and Monday increases and Tuesday drop are most similar to Fun With Dick and Jane. Fun with Dick and Jane still had another $76M in its tank after December 27, so if SH2 could maintain the same ratio with D&J as it had on Tuesday for the rest of its run, it could make another $110M, more than enough to put it over $200M. I'm not sure that SH2 can really keep that up indefinitely, but it's not as if D&J had a long run, it was out of theaters by the end of February. (Compare that to SH1, which ran until late April.) And there is some leeway for SH2 to fall behind its current ratio, as long as it doesn't fall behind by too much, and still make $200M. So, is it still a long shot? Absolutely. But is it impossible? Absolutely not.

Definitely an interesting read. Thanks for pointing it out.

I don't think we can surmise that that happened from the Summit numbers. Boxoffice.com has the day-by-day breakdown for both movies and BD1 had a huge increase on Monday -- up over 75%.Also, from the way boxoffice.com has these numbers posted, while I expect we will get real actuals from some studios, it looks like a revised estimate is probably all we're going to get from Summit today.

It's really funny that she doesn't mention TGWTDT specifically at all. All we can be absolutely sure of from what she wrote is that it did better than WBaZ, but less than $7.5M. I'd guess, however, that there's little chance it got as high as $6M -- that would be above even the projected increase which already seemed quite high. Reading into things a bit further, always a risky move, I'd say that she probably doesn't mention TGWTDT because she hasn't heard from her sources about it. And if had really had an increase of nearly 140%, a better increase than either SH2 or MI4, I'd bet somebody would be crowing about it to her.

"Happy Christmas, to all and to all a good night!" 'Night, Impact.

Absolutely. That decrease would give TDH about $1.9M on Monday for a $4.4M 2-day start.

What I'm really curious about is what will happen with WH tomorrow. In 2005, there were two Christmas Day openers; Rumor Has It increased 16.4% on December 26, while Wolf Creek fell 25.1%. Neither is really a great comparison for War Horse. Before it opened, the projections were for a much higher Monday number than Sunday, but since it ended up so much over the $4.5M projection for Sunday, it's hard to see it making the predicted 78% increase (though it would be incredible if it did).

Nikki is currently giving the following estimates (as of 8 PM PST):MI4 - up 86% from Saturday (which would be approximately $11.5M, using BOM's Saturday estimate)SH2 - up 104% from Saturday (which would be approximately $8.2M, using BOM's Saturday estimate)WH - nearly $7.5MTDH - $2.5MShe also says that Alvin 3 fell to 6th place, WBaZ moved up to 5th and Tintin dropped to 7th.

Except that Nikki's also saying that SH2 increased over 100%, which would push the mark for WH to be #2 up to over $8M.

But I'm pretty sure that projection came out before today's matinees even started. And studios tend to lowball anyway, especially with pretty much everything disappointing right now.

At least according to BOM, it looks like the current studio projection for SH2 on Sunday is only $7.01M. I definitely think WH could manage to beat that from the reports we're seeing. However, I also think the number for SH2 may be a little bit low. It looks like it more or less followed KK's Friday increase and Saturday decrease; if it followed the Sunday increase as well, SH2 would end up with nearly $7.8M.

Yeah, I don't know where they're pulling that Dragon Tattoo increase from. Among wide releases, only Dick and Jane and The Ringer had increases over 100% in 2005 and they both had worse Christmas Eve drops (significantly worse in the case of The Ringer). The Muppet's decrease is slightly easier to explain, since it is losing some more theaters and they could be using Chicken Little as a model. I still doubt it actually drops that much if at all, though.

Is projected by its studio to have the best increase. That projection could be totally wrong.

I think you're significantly underselling next weekend. Look at 2005. Very few movies decreased at all from Christmas weekend to New Year's weekend that year and nearly all of the increases were bigger than 10%, some significantly bigger. Out of the top 25 that year, there was only one movie (Polar Express) which decreased and, setting that aside, the smallest increase was 10.5%. In the top five for New Year's weekend, we had The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which managed a nearly 30% increase, King Kong up 16.5%, Dick and Jane up 14.9%, Cheaper By the Dozen 2 up a tremendous 55.6% and Rumor Has It up a whopping 169.6% (though that's largely due to the fact that it didn't open until Christmas Day, so its previous weekend was only one day long).

I'm sorry if my other post came off a bit . . . gruff. I didn't really mean it that way, but I'm pretty tired at the moment.As a rule of thumb, I think one thread for each day of box office results (estimates and actuals) is generally enough unless it gets totally out of hand. It might sometimes be reasonable to start a new thread for actuals or studio estimates, even if there was already an early estimates thread; especially if the early estimates thread gets really long, such as when there's a really major release like Potter, Twilight, Batman, etc. But I doubt it's ever really necessary (or advisable) to start a new thread for each different set of early estimates (Nikki, THR, Guru, Variety, etc.).As to merging the two threads, I'm afraid that if any of the mods or admins are around they're going to have their hands full for a bit.

Erm, I'm not sure why when there was already a Friday numbers thread and I had posted these numbers in there a few minutes earlier. Anyway, here's my comment on some of these numbers from the other thread:

That would be a great increase for Tintin -- the only movies to increase over 50% in 2005 had significant expansions -- and a very good one for MI4. I suppose it's probably due to theater loss in all cases, but that would be an extremely small increase for BD1, a decrease for NYE and (since it didn't even make the list) either a decrease or only a miniscule increase for Hugo.

Nikki has Friday estimates up now:MI4 - $9.5MSH2 - $6.5MAlvin 3 - $5.4MTGWTDT - $4.6MTintin - $3.7MZoo - $3MNYE - $1.1MAC - $1MMuppets - $983KBD1 - $639K

Slightly different numbers from Guru on Twitter:

BOM is up now; I'll add it to the first post.

No problem. And speak of the devil, boxoffice.com just posted the NYE number: $1,165,185 (+10%).AC - $855,863 (+28%)Muppets - $708,379 (+21%)HF2 - $131,119 (-2%) (wonder why it decreased)J&J - $108,279 (+15%)

I don't think it lost 1300 theaters today. BOM does have it losing close to that number of theaters this week, but it already lost 454 of those on Wednesday. So the most it would lose today is about 850 (and it's possible that it still won't lose some of those until Sunday).