Chrestomanci

Hmm, after looking at things a little more closely, it looks like the pattern this year is that almost everything is up, while in 2009 most movies were down slightly or flat. Of the movies the 7 movies that are likely to be in the eventual top 10 for the day which already have totals on boxoffice.com, only J. Edgar and The Descendants dropped, while BD1, Muppets, Immortals, HF2, and Tower Heist were all up by some mid-single digit percentage. In 2009, on the other hand, NM was one of only 4 movies in the top 10 with any kind of increase and one of those four was Precious, which increased by less than $60 (that's right, 60, I'm not forgetting a K). Only A Christmas Carol and Planet 51 saw increases of more than 1% on the equivalent Thursday that year.I don't know whether that will ultimately mean anything. It could be making up for harsher drops Wednesday, though those are generally corrections for the bigger increases on Tuesday. Or it could be our first hint that Friday increases will be lower this year. Or it could not really mean anything at all.

Interesting to see BD1 with a bigger increase than NM again. It still doesn't look to be doing enough better than NM to make up for the ground it lost during OW and Thanksgiving and actually catch it, though. But it might make a nice run at $290M and if it can gain a larger advantage on NM again over the weekend, who knows. (I finally saw BD1 this morning. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, I have to say that I liked it the least of the series so far.)You might want to check the percentage on Muppets. Without doing any real calculations, it's clear that it wasn't up close to 10%, since it was already over $800K yesterday.

If you mean BD1 has beaten DH1 on OW and on several individual days, then that is absolutely what is happening. But if you mean it will ultimately have a higher gross than DH1 . . . don't count your chickens before they've hatched. While it is certainly still a possibility, it is by no means guaranteed.BD1's Tuesday total was a bit more than 10% higher than NM's on the equivalent day. If it was able to maintain that percentage increase from NM for the rest of its run, BD1 would end up with $293.2M, still below DH1. To match DH1's total, it would in fact need to make over 13% more than NM did in the rest of its run. But maintaining a daily lead of ~10% on NM, let alone more than that, from here on out isn't likely to be easy.For instance, we know that Tuesday increases have been bigger this year in general and that they have mostly been accompanied by bigger Wednesday decreases. We may have seen that effect in part last week when BD1 had a big enough Tuesday increase to be less than 3% below NM for the day, but then had a Wednesday increase so much lower than NM's that it ended up over 12% below it on Wednesday. If something similar happens this week, BD1's daily percent advantage over NM for Wednesday is likely to be much lower than 10% and, in fact, it could even end up trailing again. Now, if it can recover again over the weekend as well as it did this weekend, that will make up for it at least somewhat, but the more days that BD1 spends with under 113% of NM's daily number now, while it's still making over a million per day, the more days it will have to have over 113% of NM's later on.There's also the question of competition. NM had to face the increasingly successful Blind Side from day 1, while NM hasn't faced any really strong competition for female audiences yet -- the fact that Blind Side really came into its own after the opening weekend may have hurt NM and may be part of why BD1 was able to gain ground back on it over the weekend. On the other hand, NM faced almost no new openers directly competing for teen and young adult female audiences during the heart of its run, with The Princess and the Frog skewing much younger, It's Complicated skewing much older and Did You Hear About the Morgans being a flop. New Year's Eve may not be nearly as strong as Valentine's Day was and in fact it may not even make more OW than The Princess and the Frog did on its first wide weekend (which was the equivalent weekend for NM), but it's almost guaranteed to aim much more squarely at the Twilight audience than any of those 2009 films did.As to overall competition, it's true that NM had to face Avatar and the chances of any movie BD1 has to face being nearly that strong are incredibly slim. But then, Avatar's biggest strength was in its legs; Sherlock Holmes 2 and Alvin 3 should easily be able to match (and probably surpass) Avatar's first weekend between them. By the time we're talking about Avatar's second weekend, NM had already been out over a month, so the numbers it was doing weren't huge at that point anyway (it only made ~$3M that weekend). And while the combination of the second weekends of SH2 and Alvin 3 and a slew of new openers may have difficulty matching the gross of the second weekend of Avatar plus the first of Alvin 2, SH1 and It's Complicated, the fact that there are 6 new wide openers may do nearly as much damage anyway, by providing ample new choices and stealing screens from older movies.In summary, to beat DH1, BD1 would not only have to match NM's legs from this day forward but do even better. It may not be able to match that goal in the very short term if today's increase was, as is likely, due to the generally higher increases we've seen on Tuesdays this year, which are almost always accompanied by harder Wednesday drops. And for every day it falls below that marker in the short term, it will need to do better later in its run, but there are reasons to think that the competition BD1 faces, at least while its still making enough money to matter, will be more difficult than what NM faced. So while BD1 beating DH1 is still possible, I'd say its far from probable.

You may be right, looking at the Monday drop and the way it acted over the weekend. But if that's the explanation for Hugo's 12% increase, what's the explanation for HF2's, I wonder. I'm also a bit surprised that The Muppets doesn't appear to have skewed a bit more adult as well, between the nostalgia angle and the lack of interest in the muppets that I saw among kids just a couple of years ago.

Some more numbers from boxoffice.com:Hugo - $617,134 (+12%)HF2 - $588,193 (+12%)J&J - $497,099 (+15%)Arthur Christmas - $438,875 (-0.3%)

I agree. While my prediction before BD1 opened was in the mid-280s and I still think that's the most likely landing point, I don't think we can rule out 290 at all. After being over 12% behind NM's daily number as late as last Thursday, BD1 has managed to climb to the point where its Sunday number was nearly even with NM's, its Monday number was a bit higher and its Tuesday number was over 10% higher. Now some of that Tuesday number is probably due to the generally larger Tuesday increases we've seen this year and I don't think we've really seen enough to fully establish a pattern for BD1. But, given what we have seen, we certainly can't rule out better legs than NM had and while it would be pretty hard to make up the nearly $10M by which it's currently running behind NM, even with better legs, BD1 would need to make up less than $4M of it to hit $290M.

Thanks. Somehow it never occurs to me to look at their twitter feed. I tend to just stick with boxoffice.com until Mojo does their full update.

I don't know where you found the numbers on Mojo, but boxoffice.com has $1,042,471 as the Tuesday number for Muppets, which is indeed down about 2.8%.A couple of other numbers from boxoffice.com:Immortals - $712,805 (+14%)Descendants - $584,378 (+20%)

I think Muppets is more likely to follow Enchanted than Tangled. I'd be willing to bet Tangled skewed considerably younger, especially early in its run, and that's why it dropped significantly harder on Thanksgiving day than either Enchanted or The Muppets. In any case, whatever the reason for the drop, the fact that Muppets had a significantly smaller Thanksgiving decrease than Tangled is probably a good indication that it will also have a smaller Black Friday increase.If it followed Enchanted from here on out we would have6.6M Wed5.9M Thurs12.7M Fri11.5M Sat6.3M Sun30.5M wknd, 43M 5-dayFrankly, that sounds much more likely to me than having both its first two days be significantly below Enchanted but its 5-day total less than a million behind, which is what you get with the scenario where it follows Tangled from here on out.

I don't disagree. I'd have been shocked if The Muppets came close to matching Tangled (and I doubt many really expected it to). But I do think there's enough history of family movies doing better than this on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving that slightly higher expectations were not necessarily unreasonable, especially with the indicators of fantastic reviews, strong Fandango sales, etc.And clearly your original point which was just doesn't hold water.(Incidentally, in my previous post I actually missed out on the biggest Thanksgiving opener of them all: Disney effectively opened Toy Story 2 on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 1999 -- like ABL, BOM has it expanding from 1 theater in the previous weekend -- and it made $9.6M on "opening" day, unadjusted.)

Interesting that her 5-day estimate for The Muppets went up $5M even though the Wednesday estimate only went up $0.1M. $50M is more than Enchanted was able to do for its 5-day, despite an opening day which was still over half a million higher than The Muppets estimated opening day.

While I don't think it's especially disappointing, it's absolutely true that "it's no Tangled." Tangled made $11.9M on its opening day last year; that's more than 1.5x the current estimate for The Muppets. And you can't play the Wednesday card to negate that statement, because Tangled also opened on a Wednesday. The fact is, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is a perfectly reasonable day to open a family film. Disney has had success with that opening pattern with Tangled, Enchanted, Toy Story, the live action 101 Dalmatians and even Flubber. (You can also effectively add A Bug's Life to that list: BOM has it expanding from 1 theater to a full wide release on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.) If Nikki's estimates hold, The Muppets seems unlikely to match the opening weekend of any of those films adjusted for inflation (and will certainly miss at least Tangled and probably Enchanted, the two most recent, even if you don't adjust for inflation). And there are even a couple of family movies that, despite having opened the previous weekend, did better (without adjusting for inflation) on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving than The Muppets is estimated to have done, namely the Jim Carrey version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the original Happy Feet. All of which is not to say that The Muppets is doing poorly, just that there is certainly precedent for a family movie to do better on this particular November Wednesday (though perhaps never with so much competition for the family audience). So while I wouldn't personally consider $7.2M a disappointing opening day for this movie, I can understand why others might have hoped for better.

She's updated her estimates and now has a full top 10. For most of the movies that already had estimates, the new numbers are lower:BD1 - 12MMuppets - 7.2MHF2 - 2.9MAC - 2.7MJ&J - 1.8MImmortals - 1.7M (she has it listed above J&J because her 5-day "estimate" is higher for Immortals)PiB - 1.6MHugo - 1.6MTower Heist - 1.2MDescendants - 850K

I think Noctis was basically just making the same point that you did in your previous post: it's just one number and things are a bit different than they were even two years ago, so even though it is a good number, don't read too much into it.And I think the other numbers that have since been posted bear out that this increase may not mean as much as it would first appear. Looking at the top 10 movies, this year there were five, that's half of the top 10, with increases of over 40% compared to only two in 2009 (though, admittedly, nothing this year was up over 50% as A Christmas Carol was two years ago). Of the top 10 this year, only BD1 increased less than 25% and Immortals was the only other top 10 movie with a less than 30% increase; in 2009, three of the top 10 increased less than 25% and another two increased between 25% and 30%, so fully half of the top 10 increased less than 30% in 2009. Since the Tuesday increases this year are larger overall, it should be no great surprise that BD1 saw a bigger increase than NM did.I'm not trying to downplay BD1's number, which was indeed very nice. But as you yourself pointed out, it's not totally unexpected. And as both you and Noctis indicated, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and declare that it will have better legs than NM on the basis of this one number.

I just saw the same thing and I use Firefox.

Hmmm. Nikki's headline (at http://www.deadline.com/2011/11/big-overseas-box-office-for-breaking-dawn/) is "'Breaking Dawn' Midnights $30.25M Playing in 3,521; Sets No. 2 All-Time Record," which would suggest that the number is actually bigger than Eclipse's. As I recall, all we ever got for Eclipse was $30M+, but there isn't much room for the + if BD1's $30.25M beat it.