Transformers held up well in the face of what proved to be very strong competition as it outgunned Mr. Popper's Penguins to retain top spot. While not the big story this week, it managed to settle into good drops on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. After falling 62% on Thursday, it recovered a bit to post a 74% drop from last Friday's holiday boom then dropped a respectable 50% on Saturday and a very nice 48% on Sunday. It had strong presales throughout the weekend and used that to its advantage as Mr. Popper's Penguins gained the upper hand with walk-ins. For this weekend, I have Transformers 3 at $1.9 million with an 8.3m 13-day total so far. As an aside, there's some good news for 2D share lovers, it got very close to the 20% barrier on Sunday with 19.77%. It is still on pace to go past 10m although the 1-2 punch of Harry Potter and Kung Fu Panda 2 will severely limit Transformer's prospects. I'll put it at 10.5m for now.

The real attention grabber this week was Mr. Popper's Penguins. It overperformed like crazy here and the penguins drew couples and kids in to catch it. Having a leading actor such as Jim Carrey doesn't hurt either. It was the individual winner of the weekend as it defeated the 3D version of Transformers 3 three out of the 4 days (Thursday, Saturday, Sunday) but could not overcome the 2D admissions for Transformers. It's still an exceptional performance in this bloodbath of summer blockbusters. It increased every day this weekend and made up in lost ground to Transformers as it closed the gap between itself and the combined admissions for Transformers 3 Friday-Sunday. Sunday was its best performing day as it just came under 60,000 for the day and was the only movie in the top 5 to increase 5% from Saturday. The opening will be somewhere between $850,000-$1,000,000 and should be around $950,000 for the 4-day weekend.

The Tree of Life is the forgotten success story this weekend as it steamrolled past Beach Spike and used its great WOM/Cannes win to attract moviegoers. It also benefited from having movie seminars to help explain to the audience what the movie means, its intentions, etc. It's a great performance that really got overshadowed by the huge success of Mr. Popper's Penguins. A weekend of about $150,000 may result.

Beach Spike meanwhile had a tough time gaining any sort of momentum as couples chose Penguins over this. It also had to deal with past movies made for young couples as there has been several already released. There are also 2 more films of this nature still to come this summer which will hinder any sort of movie from breaking out. It failed to increase double digits on any day and fell on Friday from Thursday. It had its highest admissions on Thursday which means WOM is bad and people's attentions were elsewhere.