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Spidey Knocks Out Harry Potter at Box Office
RasputinAXP writes "According to this Yahoo article, Spider-Man picked up an Amazing $114 million dollars at the box office, squishing Harry Potter's $90.3 million like a bug. More coverage is available at Box Office Prophets' new Weekend Wrapup, including analysis."
This is fabulous. This will prove Sam Rami as a real director capable of handling the big flicks and making them profitable. Maybe now someone will fund Evil Dead 4... maybe...
Im not particularly suprised, altho the parallel definitely exists. While Harry potter was catering to a much more central audience (I.E the people who read the books), Spiderman is something that everyone can identify with. Im pretty sure we've all seen the comics, the cartoons, the video games. There is just a lot more Spidey propaganda. Now, what I want to see is in 2 weeks, how much Episode 2 crushes the market...
all my
There's a better link with all sorts of box-office statistics here
I can't believe TItanic made that much!
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I would say that 114 is only 26% more than 90.
Calling that "squash like a bug" is not only bad journalism, it also shows that the person writing this has no feel for numbers.
If this was processor speeds we are talking about, the difference would be barely perceptable....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Please explain how the results for this weekend have been computed. It is still in the afternoon on Sunday when I write this.
Saying that film A made more money than film B is in the end a meaningless metric for determining how much overall success a film has enjoyed. The reason I say this is that ticket prices increase over time. This means that Titanic's $601 million, while impressive, is in the end less impressive than E.T.'s $435 million.
Tickets cost roughly $5, if not less, in 1982.
This means that roughly 87 million tickets were sold to E.T.
Tickets cost roughly $8, if not more, in 1997. This means that Titanic sold only approximately 78 million tickets, 9 million less than E.T. did fifteen years prior.
(obviously these are very rough numbers, and don't take into account many other factors such as matinee prices, 2nd run theaters, etc. but they give you the idea)
Following a gross, without accounting for inflation in ticket prices, is ultimately meaningless. It would be much more meaningful to pay attention to how many actual tickets were sold, but 87 million is a much less impressive number than 601 million, so it'll never happen.
I can dream, though.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
"Comic Books and a children's book"...
Are you one of those people who thinks that they have to "grow up" and take things seriously? Public Art, like movies, is at its best when it gets over itself and focuses and making a movie that's both FUN and GOOD. A perfect example of movies needing to "get over themselves" would the TPM, and any "brainy" movie that died at the box office.
Forget that Spider-Man is a comic book, and forget that you're supposed to put away comic books when you grow up. It's a story about a kid who gets something no one else has, and how he deals with it. It's every bit as "grown up" as a good novel, epic play, or any other bit of nonvisual art that I'd actually pick up outside of a classroom.
Oh, one more thing: RIAA and the MPAA so far haven't "suppressed" any of my rights, although I do have a dry technical complaint against them.
Perhaps after Spidey, Harry Potter, and LotR, Hollywood will finally get a fscking clue that a big budget requires a good PLOT and good ACTING to back it up, but that when you can manage all of those, everyone wins...
:)
That, and it sure can't hurt the odds of better comic book based movies being made in the future.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Message to nerds/geeks: You just have to wait for superpowers to fall on you. There is no way else you can interest a girl. This movie praises you, do not change a thing. Just wait.
Almost. But Peter got Mary Jane intersted by standing up to Flash & just being a nice guy all of those years--not by being spider-man.
;) So, the message is "talk to the girl." Heck, he even has his rich best friend steal the girl because he never says anything--what more of a "make your move" message do you want than that?
Who can forget the multi-millionaire Hollywood stars begging for attention just days after the terrorist attacks, all too eager to remind the rest of the world that they're better and more important than the lowly common folk and the situation at hand.
Or how every movie in production at the time was trying to figure out "how to best address the attacks" (Translation: how to best market it to the public).
You had the P.C. goons at the studios rushing to erase the Trade Center from their movies, past and present. ("Oh no! The sight of the buildings actually standing might offend or upset someone!")
You also had script monkeys trying to shoehorn patriotism into situations where it was not necessarily appropriate. ("Hey, I know! Let's put a bigass flag behind him!")
What's the message they're trying to get across? Spiderman standing next to the U.S. flag? Do they mean to say that we as Americans should applaud our fake heroes as "Real American Heroes" instead of our real ones?
Hollywood is trying to show that it's still important in this day and age. It clearly is not. Let fantasy be fantasy, and reality be reality. For God's sake, life is short. Let's get on with it.
Thank you.
For that matter, I've never seen them adjusted for population growth or the general economic climate. Star Wars came out when there were 200 million people in the U.S.; now there's something like 270 million plus. That's gotta make a difference, as does a movie's showing during boom times versus a recession.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I was more impressed with Tobey Maguire's performance than Willem Dafoe. I know Dafoe was directed that way but I was detecting a bit of desire for the same overwhelming scenes that Jack Nicholson delivered(and stole the movie with) in Batman. Maybe if Dafoe would have had the same kind of sreen time Nicholson had in Batman he would have came closer to it, but I don't really put them(Dafoe, Nicholson) in the same tallent boat. Anyhow, Maguire is a very tallented actor and I think he did a good job and gave a great personality to spider-man. I was a little disappointed in how Maguire's range wasn't stressed by this movie though, but with how dry some of the dialogue he had to work with was, I think he did a great job. Maybe the sequel will let him peg out.
Actually to the guy that corrected this post, it's Willem Dafoe, not Willem Defoe. But who really gives a rats ass about actors' names. That's a bit of a shallow thing to get worked up over.
This is my sig. The post is over.
Looking over the statistics at boxofficemojo.com, i've made an interesting observation.
To begin, the unadjusted statistics are meaningless. It's like looking at the price of a 1910 hotdog and concluding that the cost of lips and a$$holes has increased.
Looking over the adjusted all-time records boxofficemojo.com, things look a bit more sensible. I have no doubt that these movies represent the most popular movies of all time (about half are even on the AFI top-100).
However, if we compare this to the adjusted all-time opening weekened statistics boxofficemojo.com , we see that Not One of the top 100 was more recent then 1989.
What this indicates to me, is that over the course of the last two decades, hollywood has shifted it's advertising dollar from a constant support of a released movie, to an all-out blitz opening weekends. Why?
The VCR perhaps?
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
The people on the Queensborough Bridge and throwing stuff at the Gobiln really did embody the spirit of this city, as demonstrated not only on and after 9/11 but every day. If you don't live here, then you may believe the stereotypes of New Yorkers as pushy and rude. The fact is, there is a hell of a lot of solidarity, compassion and pride in this city, and I appreciated Raimi's and Koepp's homage to us.
I also saw nothing wrong with Spidey's leap past an American flag at the end. It was not lingered on, and in fact many tall buildings in NYC do have flags on top of them, so it was not implausible. I am one of many who feel that the symbols of this country, like the flag, represent not so much its government as its people. Spider-Man and Peter Parker are fictional, but the values they represent ("with great power comes great responsibility") are important to many Americans. I didn't mind the flag at all, and I bet most viewers would agree.
</my $0.02>
Don't get me wrong, there were flaws, but overall it was a good movie and really entertaining. For me, it is better than X-men and the first Batman. I like character development, so having peter parker go through the awkward phase of learning how to use his powers was great fun. Plus having him wrestle was just too funny.
The web shooters were always the one weak element of Spider-Man lore. The very idea that a tube of fluid small enough to not be seen under skin-tight spandex sleves could possibly produced even a single ten-story strand of webbing strong enough to hold a person's weight is preposterous. And Paker was shown as a science genious, in that he pretty much had his choice of colleges, his friend implies that he consistantly dominated the science fair circuit while growing up, got into a leading technology company right out of high school (remember him talking about getting fired for his chronic truancy?), and yes, writing papers about Osborn's work does establish him as a genius, because Osborn himself is stunned to learn that a HS student has even managed to read his stuff.
John Romita Sr. (pehaps the writer most involved in creating Spider-Man lore, after Stan Lee himself), personally came around to admiring the organic webbing as "clever", and didn't consider the change that big of a deal upon reflection.
MJ has been the main love interest of Spidey in the comics for over a quarter of a century. Did you really expect the first film to trot out the Gwen Stacey story, when she has not been a living character in the comics since 1973?
If all he's got going for him is his super powers, then isn't that exactly what he is, just another superman?
No.
What defines Parker is not that he is Nobel-prise-worthy smart (which he would have to have been to invent that webbing), but his social alienation as a brainy geek. The film captured that perfectly.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.