Saturday, January 06, 2007

The Weekend Ticket Derby

Night at the Museum, despite some lacklustre reviews, continues to shake, rattle and roll at the box office. The foreign-produced, cg-animated fairy tale Happily N'Ever After debuts on 2,381 screens but fails to ignite...

Museum has run up $147 million through Friday...

While Ever After lands with a muffled thud (and $802 per theater) for a total of $2 million.

Charlotte's Web (at #9) now totals $62.9 million...

And the long-in-release Happy Feet appears to be running low on petrol as it declines to #15 with a $182.4 million cume.

Sunday Update: The weekend estimates are in, and Happily N'Ever After clocked in at sixth with an estimated $6.8 million, which projects out to a final tally of around $20 million domestic. Which isn't too surprising, since the first weekend of the new year is a traditionally horrible time to release a film, especially one with scathing reviews. Night at the Museum continued it's surprising success, with $24 million and a $164 million total.

Happy Feet tied for 13th place with $4 million, and is now up to a healthy $185.4 megabucks.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Night at the Museum has done well because 1) there's something in it for Grandma, Granpa, mom, dad, teens and toddlers. 2) It's not offensive (one bad word, I think: "smartass." Our friends with children have been telling THEIR friends with children: this is one movie EVERYONE can go to and enjoy together. And it's true. We took our 3 children and everyone laughed. AND big bonus to us parents: we didn't have to explain why a character in the bad movie said or did something that our kids shouldn't do.

And I should add, we are not ultra-conservative people. But we do appreciate a film that doesn't make our children want to behave like bad little monkeys or teach them new "naughty" tricks.

Also, it was fun to see older actors, like Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney playing interesting roles.

We walked out of the theatre saying "this is the kind of movie we'd like to make - something an entire family can watch together."

Releasing it over the holidays was obvious genius - that's the time when people look for movies to see with the entire family.

Anonymous said...

Night at the museum had a ton of story holes and not very structured. however my family and i liked it very much for its sheer entertainment value.

i think its that more than anything else why i can look past the story holes.

Anonymous said...

oh, it didn't have a heavy political message aimed at my kids, which was very refreshing.

Anonymous said...

1st Anon here....I'm not going to say it was a great story, but it was entertaining. Certainly there are other things we'd like to see for ourselves
But for the whole family? This worked. BTW, the word "edgy" is often used to describe films that "skew older" or "attract more teenage boys." Well this film skewed older and it wasn't edgy. Interesting, no?

Anonymous said...

I went to see the movie Happily N'Ever After this weekend and saw a lot of Shrek-ish bits stirred into the pot without that seasoning of wit Dreamworks has given to their franchise. I was encouraged by some of wise-cracks in the opening few minutes but as the film rolled on the cracks lost their crackle and my eyes lids became heavy. In fact, from the writing standpoint, this film made Hoodwinked seem like a Marx Bros. classic in comparison. By the
way, it appeared that Mr. Incredible was moonlighting as the Prince in N'Ever After. Will Pixar release the Disney
legal team over this? Probably not since that would only give the N'Ever After crowd more publicity than their film deserves.

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