BOX OFFICE WATCH: WEEK 26 OF 2010

Week 26/2010 US BOX OFFICE WEEKEND 25-27 June 2010

Toy Story 3 easily kept much of its business intact again to lead the box office weekend in United States. Two debutants with plenty of stars failed to unseat the Pixar’s eleventh mega hit on top. Adam Sandler’s Grown Up has a standard start but Tom Cruise’s Knight & Day opened in a rather softer than usual for the star. Overall, the top ten films this weekend grossed an estimated $154.2 million (down 19% when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened on top last year with $109 million; and down 13% from 2008 when Wall-E debuted at number one with $63.1 million).

[NUMBER 1] Toy Story 3 remained on top in its sophomore session, generating another round of $59.0 million on the weekend, representing a large drop of 47%. While the drop seems large, it shouldn’t be a worrying facts to panic because Toy Story 3 is a sequel; means it is usually front-loaded. With summer holiday is now on its peak season and more kids are out of school, expect the business to bloom more than usual. You might need to add in the stellar critical reviews and you get a possible longevity performance until Fourth of July. Reaching $400 million for Toy Story 3 seems possible. For now, the ten day total for the 3D animation stood at $226.6 million, almost there to unseat Shrek 4 as the year’s highest grossing animation.

[NUMBER 2] Adam Sandler returned to the genre him familiar for – broad comedy and has landed with $41.0 million opening for Grown Ups. The broad comedy about 5 best pals reunites after years to commemorate the death of their school’s teacher co-starring Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Salma Hayek. The star-driven comedy didn’t attract any much good reviews but was still enough to give Sandler his fourth best opening of his career. Only The Longest Yard ($47.6 million), Anger Management ($42.2 million) and Big Daddy ($41.5 million) did better. Long term run may be enough to sail the comedy to pass the nine-digit plateau.

[NUMBER 3] The new secret agent flick Knight and Day which starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz received softer welcome, pulling in an estimated $20.5 million for the three days weekend and a total of $27.8 million since its Wednesday launch. However, it was only enough to deliver a better opening than Cruise’s flopper Lions For Lambs’ dismay opening of $6.7 million, marking his second lowest opening career for Cruise over the last decade. Reviews have been mixed and Fox is hoping that the movie will play for quite a time, although reaching the nine-digit figure looks difficult.


[OTHERS] Last week fellow debutant Jonah Hex saw its business crumbled by 70% and its weekend figure was only at $1.6 million dust. The Warner Bros flop may have to settle an estimated final figure of $11.0 million only, even lower than last spring’s fellow DC Comics release, The Losers. Anyway, check out the top ten chart below:

Rank	Movie Title	Weekend Gross ($)	Change (%)	Total Gross ($)
1	TOY STORY 3	59,000,000	-46.5	226,552,000
2	GROWN UPS	41,000,000	NEW	41,000,000
3	KNIGHT AND DAY	20,500,000	NEW	27,789,000
4	THE KARATE KID	15,400,000	-48.5	135,641,000
5	THE A-TEAM	6,000,000	-58.3	62,843,000
6	GET HIM TO THE GREEK	3,010,000	-50.7	54,486,000
7	SHREK FOREVER AFTER	2,875,000	-48.8	229,313,000
8	PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME	2,801,000	-49.7	86,177,000
9	KILLERS	2,000,000	-60.3	44,000,000
10	JONAH HEX	1,600,000	-70.3	27,886,000

*Note: All figures are estimated only. Courtesy of BOX OFFICE MOJO.
** No Malaysian data available at the time of writing yet.