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Episode II Surpasses $116 Million at Box Office
Domasi writes "The Force is with George Lucas again as the fifth installment of the Star Wars saga, 'Attack of the Clones,' took in $116.3 million in its first four days and to become the second-fastest film behind only "Spider-Man"." Spider-man is better. But I plan to see both of them again.
It is worthwhile to mention that Spider-Man is being shown on over 1000 screens more than AOTC, etc.
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look again...it is a 4 day total. for 3 days, it raked in 86 million.
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Spider-Man did it in three days without a mid-night opening.
Here's a snippet from hollywood.com: 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm's PG rated franchise installment Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones exploded in first place with an ESTIMATED $86.15 million at 3,161 theaters ($27,254 per theater).
After opening to $30,141,417 for Wednesday midnight screenings and Thursday, its four day cume is approximately $116.29 million. By comparison, Spider-Man's record setting opening was $114.8 million for a normal three day weekend (May 3-5).
Star Wars' average per theater was the highest for any film playing this weekend.
Directed by George Lucas, it stars Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen.
"That's the third best three day regular weekend opening ever after Spider-Man's $114 million and $90 million for Harry Potter," Fox distribution president Bruce Snyder said Sunday morning.
"It's the second fastest to $100 million. Of course, Spider-Man did it in three days and this is four. The previous record was Star Wars: Episode I in five days. It opened on a Wednesday (May 19, 1999). Its five day number was $105.659 million. So we've kind of blown past that in four days with $116.291 million on this one. It's just terrific and we're delighted."
Looking back at Episode I -- The Phantom Menace, Snyder noted, "Its Wednesday, the opening day, was $28.5 million. That was the high water mark for the run. The next best day was $24.4 million on Saturday (of weekend one). In this case, we opened to $30.1 million, went to $25.2 million on Friday and Saturday looks like $32.25 million, so it's actually above the opening day and the opening day, remember, had the Midnight shows (from Wednesday) folded in. So this is really a spectacular performance."
Phantom Menace wound up grossing $431.1 million in domestic theaters. Its worldwide total (domestic plus international) was $923 million. Asked about reports that Clones' Wednesday midnight shows had ticket sales of approximately $6 million, Snyder replied, "Something in that area. It depends on how they got folded into (the total for Thursday), but I think that's a fair estimate."
Here's the breakdown of box office report
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Lucas himself saw this. He limited the number of theatres AOTC was playing in - something like 1,500 theatres less than Spider-Man. In an interview he said that he knew he wasn't going to break any records, but been-there-done-that. He just wanted it to play in theatres that were up to par technically.
Adjusted for inflation, the best selling movie ever was Gone With The Wind, with Star Wars being a close second. I think Ben-Hur is among the top ten.
Cheers!
E
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Top 100 Ever Adjusted
The list makes a lot more sense with this math, though Titanic still gets ranked too highly. Unfortunately, this is only adjusted with the Consumer Price Index. I think someone should adjust for population growth as well.
for the WEEKEND (not the first day in star wars ep 2's case)
it was shown in 3,161 theaters, for an avg of $27,254 PT.
For opening weekend of spiderman:
3,615 $31,769 (yes, the difference in theaters was 454.... screens might have been 1500 but theaters wasn't THAT different it seems)
all numbers from www.the-numbers.com
Despite that, StarWars-II was doing much brisker business on it's 4th day of release than SpiderMan was doing on it's 2nd. I would expect that StarWars-II was much closer to the theoretical maximum per screen than SpiderMan was.
However, it will be interesting to see what the "2nd week falloff" is like...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just a small note to warn fellow Slashdotters in Seattle. I had the disappointing experience of getting up at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday to catch the 8:00 digital showing of Episode II downtown at the Cinerama, only to find that it wasn't digital. Funny, because it's on the list. Don't waste your money on this theatre expecting digital. (Sad that we don't have any other digital theatres here.)
Cheers!
According to CNN, "[In Quebec, Canada,] Fox is believed to be demanding 70 percent of box office receipts for the first three weeks and insisting that 'Attack of the Clones' stay in the biggest hall for 12 weeks. The studio-theater revenue split is more commonly 70-30 in favor of the studio for only the first week, dropping to 60-40 the second week, 50-50 the third week and 40-60 by the fourth week." That's why most of Quebec's independent theater owners refused to book AotC in their theaters. If Fox's demands were similar here in the States, it may also explain why fewer theaters are showing it vs. Spider-Man... regardless of how Fox tries to spin (no pun intended) the numbers in their favor.