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."

Comments

Excellent

[Cow4263]

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...

Not suprised

[Dalaram]

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...

Better link

[Riskable]

There's a better link with all sorts of box-office statistics here

I can't believe TItanic made that much!

Hey, I resent that!

[Planesdragon]

"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.

Nice movie, except for..

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoyed the movie, except for the obvious post-9/11 edits. I'm sure they seemed appropriate when they were added just days after the attacks (the New Yorkers' "you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us" line, the badly digitally inserted U.S. flag in the final scene), but they stick out like a sore thumb almost a year later.

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.

Re:Nice movie, except for..

[bc90021]

And I thought *I* was cycnical...

First, are you a New Yorker? If you're not, you don't quite know just what it was like to be on the island that day. If you do, I am surprised at how bitter you are.

Second, if you have a problem with the "post 9/11 edits", you're missing a big point. In order to accurately portray NYC now, you can't have the buildings there. It is quite unfortunate (I lost two friends, I know), but it is still true. Besides, the world got enough coverage of the gruesome happening on the news - we can cherish the memories of friends and loved ones we lost, but we don't need to be reminded every five seconds like we were on the news for two months.

Third, while you seem to have this negative image of all "Hollywood" people, I stood on line to give blood that day behind some of New York's finest actors and actresses, standing in line to help just like every one else. They weren't asking for attention, just to help.

Fourth, what is wrong with patriotism? You have a problem with it because people have re-realised what it means to be patriotic? Where were you two years ago crying about a lack of patriotism in this country?

Fifth, no one is suggesting that we applaud fake heroes. In case you missed it, there were plenty of New York's Finest, and New York's Bravest, in the movie. And that 'you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us' was always true; the rest of the country didn't know it as well as we NYers, but hey, behind that gruff exterior lies a heart of generosity. It always has.

Do they ever adjust for inflation?

[Macrobat]

I'm always skeptical about numbers like that. Do they adjust for inflation? The fact that a movie makes, say $80 million with an average ticket price of eight dollars means that exactly the same number of people saw something that made $50 million back in the days of $5 tickets. But I've never seen the numbers adjusted to account for that.

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.

Re:Not quite excellent

[Golias]

Oh, gawd... LET IT GO ALREADY!!!

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.