MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3 - MI3 PARAMOUNT 4,054 17,019,000 4,198 n/a 17,019,000
2. RV SONY 3,651 2,964,000 812 n/a 22,882,000
3. AMERICAN HAUNTING, AN FREESTYLE 1,667 2,025,000 1,215 n/a 2,025,000
4. STICK IT BUENA VISTA 2,044 1,883,000 921 n/a 14,318,000
5. UNITED 93 UNIVERSAL 1,819 1,499,000 824 n/a 16,322,000
6. SILENT HILL SONY 2,556 1,152,000 451 n/a 38,040,000
7. SCARY MOVIE 4 WEINSTEIN CO. 2,537 998,000 393 n/a 80,912,875
8. HOOT NEW LINE 3,018 963,000 319 n/a 963,000
9. AKEELAH AND THE BEE LIONS GATE 2,195 900,000 410 n/a 8,167,000
10. ICE AGE 2: THE MELTDOWN 20TH CENTURY FOX 2,426 896,000 369 n/a 180,164,000

I'll get 0% on Hoot...bleh.

Think 98.41% of players will get zero there. :-)

Nah. Many predicted below $8 million and I think it will still be able to reach $4 million this weekend.

United 93 numbers are pathetic.

United 93 dropped 60%. So much for the strong WOM.

RV dropped only 34%. So much for the poor WOM.

Damn that's so disappointing, 17 mil opening almost makes me want to cry. I guess BKB's last minute 45 million will be very close then.

but i thought poseidon was the flop

Wow, so it looks like a lot of people didnt see it because they were annoyed by cruise's life as of late, am i wrong?

i blame marketing. i didnt see too many tv spots till like..this wednesday when i saw like 2 a day.

TROY AND VAN HELSING WERE NOT FLOPS. God.

Exactly. And neither is MI:3. Like Troy, I expect the film to perform well (not as well as Troy) internationally. I don't find the opening surprising, or particularly disappointing. Spider-Man and X2 have spoiled us, to be frank. Excluding them, this is one of the best openings for the first May release ever.

Holy shit! That's a huge disappointment for MI3. It doesn't look like it will even beat Scary Movie 4's opening weekend. I blame Tom Cruise for sure. No way would it have done this disappointing if it weren't for him. He turned many off.

HOOT did atrocious! What a waste of theaters! I thought it would have a hard time attracting people outside of fans of the book, but it doesn't look like it even attracted them. I say New Line should put it on DVD soon, like in July for sure. Waiting any longer would be stupid.

AN AMERICAN HAUNTING did solid.

I have been seeing about 20 spots a day since 2 weeks ago.

Projections for Derby movies:

MI3 $47m
RV $11.5m
Stick It $5.3m
American Haunting $5.3m
United 93 $5.1m
Silent Hill $3.6m
Hoot $3.5m
Akeelah $3.5m
Scary Movie 4 $3.3m
Sentinel $3m

Why did I raise my Hoot prediction from 6.5 to 7?

UNITED 93 did awful! I thought it would have good legs with its weaker opening, but it dropped like some frontloaded blockbuster. Eeek! A lot of movies are going to have bad drops this weekend.

Based on your predictions, we'd only beat 2005 by 15%!!! W/ ticket price increase, its more like 11-12%. That's pretty dismal. But it seems like Spiderman 3 could do that total in its first 2 days, so we should get a huge bump up from that!

Shut the hell up about SUPERMAN.

Well going into Van Helsing, people slated it for $55-60 m I think, so it wasn't that off the mark. But MI3 its opening was hovering around $70 m, so to go under that by $20 m +, and be comparable to the first film's opening from 10 years ago is much, much worse than Van Helsing

Neither were flops at all. Both did 100m+. A flop would be like 50m.

My weekend predictions:

1. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3 - 51.3m
2. RV - 11m
3. AMERICAN HAUNTING, AN 5.1m
4. STICK IT - 6.3m
5. UNITED 93 - 5.1
6. SILENT HILL SONY - 3.6m
7. SCARY MOVIE 4 WEINSTEIN CO. 3.3m
8. HOOT NEW LINE 3,018 963,000 319 n/a 963,000
9. AKEELAH AND THE BEE 2.9m
10. ICE AGE 2: THE MELTDOWN 3.5m

I think audiences just don't want to suffer through the whole ordeal all over again. And why would you? If you want to watch a good movie, go rent something else.


The whole 9/11 thing can have an effect on the box-office, but I think the effect is more evident in the case of films like Spider-Man, where cinema is used as a way to escape reality, or to watch something which is affirmative and vaguely patriotic and uplifting. If I had a tough day at work, do I want to spend the evening watching a film about a guy who is having a tough day at work? Or do I want to watch a comedy or a thriller that will help me forget things for a while? It's far worse with tragedies, where anything remotely connected with the event will continuously evoke the traumatic experiences initially suffered through.

Agree. It is certainly not appealing to many. None of my friends/colleagues have watched it.

I agree.

I truly believe Tom Cruise's antics have muted what could have been a gangbuster opening in the $20 million range. I'm not really impressed with this number at all, although perhaps I just had too high of expectations. In any event, the film is going to head to only a $50 million weekend, right? With 10:00 PM/midnight shows added to the friday number, it should be nicely inflated. So MI3 could actually only end up in $45-49 million range, if the weekend multiplier is below 3. Pretty crummy, in my opinion.

Hoot ultra-bombed, and I really should have gone with my gut. I honestly knew not a single thing about this film and saw not a single advertisement, and I don't say this lightly. Some people exaggerate it all the time, but this is honestly one case where the film came out of nowhere. Hoot? Hoot what? Bleh.

American Haunting surprised me by how well it could do. And holdovers generally fell hard.

Really so-so weekend, in my opinion.

PEACE, Mike.