MikeQ

TORN - that was the one! I do remember TORC as well. It was wonderful back in the day - so much LOTR news to consume. Leading up to the first film's release was just like the lead up to Christmas as a kid. A great feeling. Peace, Mike

For me, I started following in 2001 with Lord of the Rings. The films coming out were a big thing for me, because I had read the book when I was young, and it had made a huge impression on me. There was a LOTR/Tolkien fan site I discovered and frequented, and they would link to the daily box office gross of LOTR at BOM. I started following the film's daily gross, hoping every day that the gross would go up rather than down, and wishing for it to stay at #1 and not fall against other films. Back during that time, I would constantly refresh the Box Office Mojo home page, hoping to see the "Updated at" notice in the top right corner change to say the numbers had just been recently updated. It seems silly now that I know so much more about box office, heh, but it started my interest in box office, and the BOM forums created a huge community of like-minded nerds like me. I'm still sad that place is gone, and wish BOM did more to cultivate a box office community like they used to. They used to run a weekend box office prediction contest, which kept stats on how well people were doing and was, from my perspective, the holy grail of box office prediction contests. If you were on the top of the charts in this contest, you were noticed -- and those at the top at the end of the year were the best. I was pretty good back in that day. Peace, Mike

Nicely done on converting the films that disappointed into "flop" titles. Finding Dory and The Purge would have made for good "flop" titles too, I think, if they had disappointed: "Finding Floppy", and, "The Flop: Election Year" (this would accurately describe the current US presidential election process this year) Peace, Mike

Excellent for both Dory and Purge. I suppose considering expectations, The Legend of Tarzan is doing "not bad", but still pretty darn poor for the scale and budget of the film. I suspect it will have mixed WOM. That, combined with an inflated holiday opening weekend, will likely result in so-so legs, and it should finish under $100 million total domestic. BFG looks like the clear loser, at least in terms of opening weekend. It's fortunes depend on where it falls for the Friday and weekend. If it falls on the high end and proves to have decent-enough legs, it could do okay. But still pretty poor considering budget. Personally, Spielberg-directed films don't get me hyped up anymore on name alone, because I can't remember the last Spielberg film I actually really enjoyed. Peace, Mike

Bourne is incredibly appealing to me - the trailer just looks awesome. Is it reading as well to general audiences, I wonder? Because it looks really good to me. I wonder if this one could surprise and do quite well, depending of course on how good it actually is. Peace, Mike

Based on the weekdays, if it were an ordinary weekend, I think Dory would be looking at a ~45% weekend drop (3-day). But since Friday is a national holiday in Canada, and Monday is a national holiday in the US, the Friday and Sunday will be inflated for the 3-day weekend. I expect a ~40% drop as a result. Thus, I see $43-44 million for the 3-day weekend. Dory is lucky that this year the US holiday falls on the Monday - so, while it's 4-day total gross will be harmed (as the Monday won't be as strong), it's 3-day weekend won't be docked in the way that both Toy Story 3 and Inside Out's weekends were. Thus, I don't think it's unreasonable to see a ~40% drop from Dory, particularly as the openers look to all be relatively muted, once again. Next weekend will be the interesting one to look at for Dory, with The Secret Life of Pets opening. However, Inside Out only dropped 40% against the huge opening of Minions, and as Secret Life of Pets will not open nearly this large (I expect $65-70 million), Dory could also have a solid drop, but it depends. Dory will be coming off an inflated previous weekend, so I expect a harder drop (45-50%). And perhaps Inside Out only had a solid hold because of sold out shows and overflow. I'm not sure yet how next weekend will pan out. Peace, Mike

The argument that Finding Dory will have a "hard time" in the UK because Pets opened big is a fallacious one. That's been proven wrong time and time again, and we know that big well-received films can co-exist (all we have to do is look to last summer domestically with Inside Out, Jurassic World, and Minions -- Inside Out and Jurassic World co-existed beautifully, and Inside Out only dropped 40% against Minions huge $113 million opening weekend). Perhaps you know more about how the UK market behaves than I do; however, Finding Dory, from my knowledge, doesn't open until July 29th in the UK, so I'm not sure precisely what are you trying to argue. What also confuses me is that in the same post you suggest the opposite logic domestically - that with Pets on the way, this will hurt Dory, rather than Dory's huge opening meaning Pets will have a hard time. Certainly Dory's opening in France is very disappointing, but I would hesitate extrapolating that to other regions so readily. You don't mention, for example, that Dory is outdoing Nemo in most other comparable regions it has opened, such as Argentina, Australia, Russia, and obviously China. It has yet to open in Germany, Japan, UK, Mexico, etc, etc. It looks like most of it's biggest markets are in July. So, I'm not sure that your overall argument holds up, from my perspective. Peace, Mike

Which is in keeping with Roland Emmerich's last film, 'Stonewall', which was also a terrible, whitewashed, piece of garbage film that pushed real life people of colour to the sidelines. Can you tell that I'm so over this director? Peace, Mike

You are too kind!! Like I said, you're a legend - I'm always all ears when you have something to say. I so remember back in the day... wish they hadn't gotten rid of the forums, or had the old posts still archived somewhere, would love to revisit that... Peace, Mike

You too!!! I could never forget you, baumer. What can I say -- you're a legend. You go back to the BOM days - I still have clear memories of you and I and many of those original BOM members, and the interactions we had. I'm glad you're still around here -- I've been lurking here for a bit. Peace, Mike

I read through the thread and noticed the debate about whether Finding Dory would hit a 3.5 multiplier (i.e. $475 million domestic) or not. Looking at past Pixar movies in the "high class" category (those with 90%+ on rotten tomatoes), I would be surprised if Dory doesn't hit that 3.5 multiplier. Dory seems to already be running strong, with an excellent Monday and Tuesday (at least from perspective). However, we'll see what the rest of the week looks like, as it's possible Dory will not pull strong enough numbers. But considering Pixar history, and the strong WOM and critical reception for Dory, an under 3.5 multiplier would be somewhat surprising for me. Even a couple of Pixar's "not as great" movies hit the 3.5 multiplier. Having looked back at this, I'm reminded of Pixar's incredible consistency, both in terms of relative box office success and critical reception. Most of their collection range from good to excellent, with many that a lot of people would highlight as classics. Their only real stinker has been Cars 2. I would say that's a very good track record. But I digress. Pixar Movie Multipliers 90%+ RT Score Class Inside Out - 3.94 Toy Story 3 - 3.76 Up - 4.30 Wall-E - 3.55 Ratatouille - 4.39 The Incredibles - 3.71 Finding Nemo - 4.83 Monsters, Inc - 4.09 Toy Story 2 - 4.28 (using first wide weekend) A Bug’s Life - 4.89 (using 3-day wide weekend), 3.56 (using 5-day wide) Toy Story - 6.58 (using 3-day), 4.91 (using 5-day) Finding Dory - TBD The ‘Other’ Pixar Movies The Good Dinosaur (76%) - 3.14 (using 3-day), 2.22 (using 5-day) Monsters University (78%) - 3.26 Brave (78%) - 3.58 Cars 2 (39%) - 2.89 Cars (74%) - 4.06 Peace, Mike

Incredible number for Finding Dory. It has outdone my expectations for how well it would do so far. I see $500 million domestic total happening at this point, as WOM looks to be strong; but we'll see what the rest of the week is like. With Independence Day 2 being rotten on Rotten Tomatoes and perhaps having a relatively muted opening weekend, Dory could continue to dominate. Peace, Mike

Finding Dory gets an A Cinemascore.

If $14.2 million holds up as the eventual Sunday number, and Friday and Saturday are as estimated, WB only overestimated the weekend by about $400,000, and the weekend actual will be ~$52 million, and a ~68.7% drop from it's opening weekend. Peace, Mike

Every time rth has used a comic book to reference a daily number, it has always been using the issue number. He's been consistent on that matter, even with a bunch of other numbers on the comics he's used. Thus, unless rth is suddenly wanting to throw us a loop, $14.2 million is the number. Peace, Mike

Didn't Gitesh also say BvS' opening day was $78 million, when rth was right all along and it was $82 million? I have a hard time believing gitesh anymore. I'm betting the Wednesday number is closer to rth's $8.5 million. Peace, Mike

I think we need to be cautious in interpreting a single daily number. One daily number will often make us go "amazing" or "terrible", but it really ends up coming down to the contours of the week as a whole. It's possible that with a steep Tuesday drop, the Wednesday drop will be somewhat better than usual. Certainly we will make our daily observations and analyses as we do as box office nerds, but I do think we could all stand to be more humble and respectful in our statements. We also don't know how the drop compares to the other films on Tuesday yet. I don't post much on here, but I have to say that I am personally a fan of rth's 'teaser' posts - this has been one of the more interesting threads to read. Peace, Mike

What page is RTH's 81-85 projection? There's so many pages it's hard for me to find. Thanks so much to anyone who recalls and can direct me Peace, Mike Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It's past midnight EST, and still no Saturday numbers from anywhere? I know, I've become spoiled.

That's what I recall too. I hope Deadline is wrong, and rth shows up with a higher number. Peace, Mike

There is no way it drops that much on Sunday - it's Valentine's Day. Peace, Mike

Cinemascores: Deadpool: A How To Be Single: B Peace, Mike

Terrific for The Revenant. A 20% drop from last weekend for the 3-day, and almost flat (a mere 2% drop) for 4-day weekend!! Nice to see Spotlight jump up to a $2 million 4-day weekend. I'm just glad because of the expansion that more people will see it. Peace, Mike

This was one of Hardy's worst performances. He really chews away at that accent, which drops in and out, with his mouth barely orating in some weird attempt to sound, I don't know, "gritty" and "real". I found him distracting, and the film could have been better in part with a better antagonist for Glass. There were some terrific moments in this film - when Fitz tells Glass to blink if he wants him to kill him - jesus, that is hard to watch. I thoroughly enjoyed the relationship established between Glass and his son. And I don't want to minimize the impact of the direction and cinematography in parts of the film. But the film doesn't work quite right as a whole. I can't articulate exactly right now why it doesn't quite work for me. I think it's because the narrative drive kind of disappears in the middle of the film, and the middle portion doesn't demonstrate to me how Glass gets from point A to point B in terms of his character arc. What does Glass learn? He has a real physical journey getting back to the outpost, but what was his spiritual/emotional journey? It wasn't evident to me, at least, so then when he makes the decision to 'let go' at the end, I'm not sure how or why. And the film could have been edited down and been tighter while still retaining it's reflective/thoughtful and beautiful quality. I will write a longer review at some point if I have the time. Peace, Mike

If the projections hold up (and who knows if they actually will, I don't trust Deadline), but if they are correct, that's a terrific second weekend for The Revenant. Only a 22% drop for the 3-day, and a mere 8% drop for the 4-day. That's a remarkable hold, especially since it had opened to nearly $40 million to begin with. We'll see if this actually comes to fruition or if it's lower with the real estimates & actuals. Peace, Mike