How the movie with what potentially will end up as the 5th-biggest opening weekend of the year (Fantastic Four, I can only see its opening being topped by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and King Kong) almost certainly won't make its way into this year's Top 10, despite such a big $56 million opening.

How fast box-office changes...

Funnily enough, something similar happened to another Marvel property back in 2003, Hulk which by the end of the year, had the year's 6th biggest opening weekend and yet ended up as #14 of the year. In the end legs do matter, even for blockbuster openers.

I think it's more funny how this year has been dissapointing in terms of opening weekends, but incredibly surprising in terms of legs. Blockbusters this summer haven't been acting like they did in the past two years.

Yeah it's also funny how movies back in the day would open to less than $30 million and yet break records and gross tons of cash (Titanic, Forrest Gump, E.T., Star Wars, Raiders). I want legs damnit! lol

That's hard to achieve with more than one movie coming out every weekend. People now have too many choices and going to the movies on opening weekend is the cool thing to do.

Still, this year the legs are really good, as Zingaling have pointed out. Mr. & Mrs. Smith will end up with a multiplier of around 3.7, Hitch stands at a multiplier of 4.16. Batman Begins will end up with a multiplier of around 3.7 as well. War of the Worlds looks to finish with a multiplier of 3.15, The Longest Yard's multiplier will be close to 3.4, Madagascar's will be around 4.1 and so on...

Yeah I know... and now since DVD's came out people will just wait for the DVD to watch the movie again instead of going to say, the 15th weekend of a film's release like they did with E.T. or Titanic.

Yeah, and all of those movies had opening weekends over $40 million, so that says something. There were lots of movies that opened to over $40 million last year and were lucky to hit a 3x multiplier.

Legs are over....
Nowadays, any big movie garners multiple screens per theater and a Wensday opening... The supply(seats) can now increase to meet demand, efficently... Also, earlier, people might wait a week to go, WOM was slower back then.... And shallow films don't help the situation......

Besides BB, this is mostly the result of the type of films opening big this year. Hitch, Madagascar, The Longest Yard, were all comedies. Even Mr. & Mrs. Smith largely became a hit with the comedy audience. WOTW has a wide audience, not only the moviegoers that see action special effect films, so it’s legs are somewhere in between. Only really BB has been entirely because of WOM. It would have pulled a multiplier near 2.5-2.7 without it. The rest of the action and horror films this year have been frontloaded (Elektra, Constantine, Sin City, xXx: State of the Union, White Noise, Boogeyman, The Ring Two etc.) but they have not opened with blockbuster numbers. The first such large opener is now F4, which will suffer a large drop next weekend.

Compare this to last year when the big openers included Van Helsing, Troy, TDAT, Harry Potter 3, Spiderman 2, I, Robot, The Bourne Supremacy, The Village and AVP all of which opened well by attracting their fanbases or by attracting the action/horror/special effects audience. Shrek 2 was the type to have good legs (family films are not affected by “sequelitis”) and it did.

2003, the summer of the sequel, was and even more extreme example of this.

I think this year goes to prove that it is not large openings that cause frontloading. It’s the type of film. Usually the major openers are the action/franchise types that are naturally frontloaded. So, you have the big 2nd weekend drops. Not this year.

It's because hollywood loves making movies that give you the impression they will be a lot of fun, but then don't actually deliver. They've mastered that art.

LIKE FANTASTIC FOUR!
[i actually saw it]

and Sith \:D/ 3.5