Up easily made it to first place by about $44 million. Pixar’s tenth movie pulled in $68,108,790, about $7 million more than my prediction. Up also set the new standard for 3D openings, with just over $35 million coming from the extra-dimensional showings. It followed the recent weekly record-breaking trend and took the biggest 3D opening crown from 10-week old Monsters vs Aliens. I’m not exactly a slavish fan of everything Pixar does, but it’s heartwarming to see that the they’ve become so successful without always packing their movies full of quasi-celebrities and pop culture crap.

Even though Drag Me to Hell promised R-rated thrills to a PG-13 audience and had no competition in the horror genre, it only managed $15,825,480, well below my $23 million guess. It had extremely favorable reviews, an unmolested target audience, and a director whose last three movies have totaled nearly 2.5 billion worldwide, but for some reason it just couldn’t find much of an audience. It did okay, averaging $6,310 per theater, but it should have done better. Accounting for inflation, Drag Me to Hell didn’t even out-gross Raimi’s last pre-Spider-Man wide release, For Love of the Game, and barely made more than the 19-year old Darkman, which was in 800 fewer theaters.

Star Trek was the only previously released wide release to fall less than 45% from last week, dubiously making the cut at 44.9%. Terminator Salvation made just $16 million in it’s second weekend, for a $91 million total. It’s going to fall far short of it’s $200 million budget. Even though Angels & Demons isn’t exactly taking US audiences by storm, it’s kicking extreme amounts of ass in foreign markets ($105 million US, $252 million foreign).

The turd of the week was Battle for Terra, making $193 this weekend. That’s a 96% drop from last week. It made about $16 per theater per day. Does that even cover the power used to run the projector?

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Up is the widest release this weekend, in 3,766 theaters. It’s also the tenth feature put out by Pixar, and their name has basically become the gold standard in computer animation. And they’re really trying to make a point that their name is bigger than the subject of whatever movie they put forth. Cars was about a car that got arrested and had to repave a road, Ratatouille was about a rat that wanted to be a chef, and WALL-E was about a robot cleaning up the garbage left behind on an Earth abandoned by humans. Those aren’t your usual topics for big-budget animated movies aimed at kids. Up is no different, about an old man that ties thousands of balloons to his house so he can float away and find adventure. But it’s a Pixar movie and as usual, it’s getting great reviews. Up should be number one this weekend, the only competition coming from last week’s Night at the Museum II, which is competing for the same audience. I think it’ll still manage to pull in around $61,492,540.

The other new wide release this weekend is Drag Me to Hell, and it’s a pretty thin affair-  some chick pisses off an old women and gets cursed in the process. It’s the first step back into horror for director Sam Raimi since Army of Darkness. Raimi’s been growing fat and lazy on the Spider-Man teat this century, so it’s nice to see him finally doing something different. He’s got a rare talent to balance disgust and amusement, gasp and guffaw. Over the years he’s seemed to have lost some of that. If you watch The Evil Dead and Spider-Man 3 back-to-back, it’s almost painful to see how much more generic he’s become. In the former you can really feel the filmmaking process- in the latter, you feel the budget meetings. Ingenuity was replaced with scale and the movies are worse for it. Drag Me to Hell is being touted as Raimi’s return to his roots and, like Up, is getting rave reviews (which easily makes this the best reviewed weekend in a long time). I’d say this movie would do really well at the box office, but I’m not sure there’s enough money to go around this weekend. I’m going to say it’ll make around $23,381,808, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it got closer to $30 million.

Night at the Museum II should wind up in second place, with Terminator Salvation likely edging out Drag Me to Hell for third. Star Trek and Angels & Demons should both still be somewhere in eight-digit numbers. There’s a chance we could see close to $200 million spent this weekend.

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My history delving into movie numbers only goes back to last September, so I don’t have a long history of knowledge to draw from, but it seems to me that even since just last year, there’s been a noticeable increase in the importance of a movie having a big opening weekend. Sure, having a big opening weekend should always be the goal of a movie, but it takes several weeks for most movies to get near breaking even, that’s generally not even close after one weekend. It follows that of course the first weekend is important, but maximizing the box office of the entire theatrical run should be paramount.

But that isn’t the reality. In practice, as time has gone on, the opening weekend has become the sole focal point and anything after is icing on the cake. The picture in this post isn’t just a nice graphic to visually convey the topic, it’s actually the graph of the weekend totals for Watchmen.

The Holiday (Fall-ish) and Summer movie seasons are when the moneymaking movies are generally released, so we’ll look at those two periods over the years. For the Holiday season, during the 1980’s, the average decline from the first weekend to the second weekend was around 15.7%. In the 1990’s, that average increased to 24.1%. So far in the 2000’s, the average second weekend drop has increased to 31.2%. For the Summer season, the average decline has increased from 30.3% to 38.6% to 48.8%.

So what does that mean? Movies now are getting a higher percentage of their total gross from the opening weekend. They’re building up the hype to give them a big opening and hope some of it spills over into the next few weeks.

Looking at it another way, the percentage of a movie’s box office that comes from the opening weekend has increased over the years. In the 80’s it was 15.7%, 90’s was 21.5%, and the 2000’s is 33.1%. Nowadays a movie’s opening weekend represents twice as much of it’s box office as it did during the 80’s.

Out of the 100 biggest second weekend drops since 1982, three were from the 80’s, 35 from the 90’s, and 62 from the 2000’s.

Of the movies that have debuted in over 3,000 theaters since 1982, the one that has experienced the biggest drop in the second weekend was this year’s Friday the 13th, which dropped 80.4%. X-Men Origins: Wolverine comes in with the sixth biggest drop (69%) and Watchmen the tenth (67.7%). That’s three of the top ten movies that have seen the biggest second weekend drop, all from 2009. The oldest movie in the top 10 is Hulk from 2003. The oldest movie on the list of 58 was Pokeman from 1999.

Let’s take a look at Angels & Demons. It made $46 million it’s first weekend. Based on the averages, it might make around $24 million this weekend and $138 million overall. Using the 1980’s average (with an average 80’s ticket price of $3.41), a movie like A&D would have opened to $22 million, had a second weekend of $15 million, and a total of $140 million. The overall total is nearly identical, but the 80’s opening was less than half the 2009 opening.

There is even a trend developing where movies are relying more heavily on their opening day. The list of movie whose opening Friday represented the biggest percentage of their opening weekend is topped by Hannah Montana the Movie, only a month old. 53.9% of Hannah’s opening weekend came from Friday. Twilight is number two at 51.7%. Think about it: the two movies in the history of movies that have had their opening day represent the biggest portion of their opening weekend were released in the last six months. Four of the top five were released in the last seven months. 20 of the top 100 were released in the past year.

There have been more than 600 movies released into theaters each year since 2006. There aren’t enough screens to go around for everyone to have a nice long run, so studios gear everything toward the opening weekend and hope for the best. With so much resting on that one weekend, if it isn’t big, all hope is lost for the film being financially viable in the near future. Take a movie like Watchmen, with a $150 million budget and a $55 million opening weekend it looked good, but it cut it’s losses after 11 weeks and $107 at the box office, averaging $5.2 million per week after it’s first weekend. Those first three days of a movie’s release have become the most important in the entertainment industry.

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Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian plays the role of the family movie. The difference between this movie and the original is that it takes place in SURPRISE! the Smithsonian. Other than giving the museum more advertising than it’s ever had during it’s entire existence, I suppose all it really means is that there will be different exhibits to rankle Ben Stiller’s character, which is probably all people really want out of the movie: Ben Stiller overacting.

The first Night at the Museum made $250 million domestically. It opened to $30 million, but the second weekend shot up to almost $37 million. It’s pretty rare to see the second weekend bigger than the first, most likely the result of some great word of mouth. I’m not sure if it’s really the case, but there doesn’t seem to me to be a whole lot of buzz around the movie. Could it be that this was a one-shot idea and putting the same characters in a different museum sounds ridiculously contrived? What’s next, Adventures in the Museum of Modern Art? I’ll say the Smithsonian edition of Night at the Museum takes in around $49,600,469 this weekend, solid, but not spectacular. I still find it hard to see how the guys behind Reno 911! wrote both these movies.

It’s been six years since the last Terminator movie, but that’s probably not enough time for most people to get suped about another sequel. T3 had the biggest opening weekend of the series, but T2 had the biggest overall box office. I read that as people were excited for a sequel but less than thrilled with what they got. Terminator Salvation is going to change things up by moving to the future and giving us that back-story. There will be some people who are extremely geeked out to see that, but Joe Matinee might not be wetting himself over it. After all, this is another big-budget scifi movie, which have been showing up in droves lately. Eventually audiences will tire of it. I’m not sure about the long-term outlook for the movie, but I’ll say it goes for about $59,946,935 from Friday to Sunday. Too much competition from movies in the same genre right now for it to go higher.

Lastly we’ve got Dance Flick, and it’s relying like hell on the Wayans name. And really, that name is the only chance this movie has. Spoof movies have gone from silly to nigh-insufferable. Who saw Disaster Movie? Superhero Movie? Did you even know there was a Superhero Movie? The genre had been going a similar route at the end of the 1990’s with stuff like Mafia! and Plump Fiction flinging poo at your eyes. Then Scary Movie dropped in 2000 and reinvigorated the whole thing. That’s what Paramount is hoping will happen with Dance Flick, but this time they’re resting those hopes on the backs of the progeny of the folks that made Scary Movie, familiar sounding names like Damien Wayans and Damon Wayans Jr. But you can tell this just isn’t the same thing by reading the credits. There are characters such as Tracy Transfat, Uglisha, Ms. Cameltoe, and the whole Brady Bunch. This sounds all too similar to the same crap we’ve been getting since, well Date Movie, anyway. It makes me yearn for the days of Hot Shots!, or even Hot Shots! Part Deux. I think the familiar names behind the movie might get it to $9,517,788 this weekend.

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Hasbro finally broke the board game radio silence, announcing they’re getting close to convincing Peter Berg to direct the movie adaptation of Battleship. Obviously, since there is no plot in the game, details on a possible story are nonexistent, unless saying they’ve going for an epic naval action adventure-y type of movie counts as plot details.

Berg is a passable enough director, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than his middling talent to craft an interesting story out of a game that’s basically a glorified version of Bingo. Jon and Erich Hoeber are going to have the primary duty in creating the story, seeing that they’ve signed on to write the screenplay. The brothers Hoeber are suddenly a hot commodity having written screenplays for four movies that are yet to be released. They did write one movie you may (or probably may not) have seen, Montana from 1998. Eleven years is a bit of a break after having just broken in.

What the Battleship name will lend to a story is anyone’s guess. B-4? Miss. D-7? Miss. A-9? Miss. I’m sure there’s a story there somewhere. Really, there’s even less to go on than the story behind Candy Land, and there is no story behind Candy Land.

If they really wanted to go all out with the movie, they would combine the capitalization of the Battleship name with a remake of The Battleship Potemkin, combining Hollywood’s fondness for pointless adaptations with it’s love of needless remakes. I could just imagine the Odessa Steps sequence in the new movie: soldiers marching down the steps firing into the crowd calling out Hit! or Miss!

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Angels & Demons managed to hold off Star Trek and claim first place, pulling in $46,204,168. My prediction was only about $18 million high, but I’m not upset- it’s always good to get knocked down a peg after a string of successes. It was a little hard to know exactly what A&D was going to do because 1) The Da Vinci Code had a huge opening weekend and 2) it was the first big non-scifi movie in a couple weeks. Both of those factors made me think it could be a big weekend, but a lack of buzz and controversy hinted at an average weekend. Before I had adjusted my prediction, the calculated total was $42,741,461. Sometimes it’s best to have faith in the math.

Not being able to crack $50 million had to be a bit of a disappointment for Sony Pictures, but the movie also made $102 million overseas this weekend, for a grand total of $148 million, a hair short of the production budget. So even if the domestic totals disappoint, the movie is still going to make a lot of money.

Star Trek and it’s good word of mouth led to a $43 million weekend. That’s a drop of just 43% from last week, the smallest second week drop for a movie debuting at number one since Knowing back on March 27th. With a 10-day total of $147,645,384, Star Trek also has  the distinction of being the highest-grossing movie in the Star Trek pantheon, spanking Star Trek IV’s $109 million total.

Despite having a DVD release last Tuesday, Taken still managed almost $240,000 in theaters this weekend. It’s not a lot, but it works out to a per-theater average of $960 dollars, which is very respectable for a movie released all the way back on Super Bowl Weekend.

Monster vs Aliens had a fantastic weekend, dropping just over 2% from last week, actually averaging more per theater. Battle for Terra can seemingly do little right, managing to drop 79% this weekend for a $36,488 take. At least they can say it did better than Delgo.

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At a recent panel on the future of filmmaking, CEO Michael Lynton said, “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.” He further goes on to claim the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.” This coming from the former President of AOL International.

Yes, yes, we all know that movie piracy is one of the biggest threats to the survival of planet Earth. Bajillions and cajillions of dollars of revenue are lost every year to the stupid, evil, disrespectful bastards on the Internet. Yeah, we already know about that. I’d imagine if someone in Hollywood took half a second to look away from the mirror they’re staring in, maybe they’d notice that there are other things in the world besides movies. And maybe, juuust maybe, a couple of those things might be beneficial to humanity. Certainly the worldwide dissemination of information and ability to collaborate in disparate locales are beneficial, and I’d imagine Hollywood relies on those two aspects of the Internet every damn day. But those studio execs would rather we go back to newspapers and telegraphs. That would get those pirates but good!

Anne Hathaway was also on the panel, likening blogs to the writing on bathroom walls.

For some reason occasional writer/director/producer Nora Ephron was there as well, echoing Lynton’s sentiments: “We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it… Stop it. I dare you.”

It’s terrible, all the destruction the Internet has wrought. But fret not, we’re the people hellbent on ruining our environment. I’m sure there are plenty of ways we can kill off one piddly little Internet. Obesessing over movie piracy might be a good place to start.

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Sony’s big chance comes in the form of Angels & Demons, sequel to The Da Vinci Code. I hated that movie. Ugh. All of the “clues” were just weird inferences that went way over the top. Just ridiculous. And the thing had more endings than Return of the King. It ended and went on for another 20 minutes or half-hour or something. I’m not really sure since I was nearly unconscious from the ludicrosity. Personally, I think South Park had a much more accurate asessment of da Vinci’s clues.

I’m likely in the minority since The Da Vinci Code made $217 million. So it’s got that going for it. It also has the synergy of Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, which have thus far combined for nearly half a billion dollars at the box office. It’s a winning combination and should win this weekend with a haul somewhere around $64,112,192.

A&D probably has some competition from Star Trek, which seems to getting good word of mouth and generally pleasing audiences. Wolverine will actually be in the most theaters this weekend, but that thing is losing an audience faster than… well, pretty fast. The daily gross for Wolverine has been down almost 65% from the first to second weeks. If that trend continues, the movie will have a hard time getting above $10 million for the weekend. That’s a quick fall for a  movie that opened to $85 million.

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I recently treated (some might say subjected) myself to a Living Dead marathon, watching Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and Diary of the Dead back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. There are worse ways to spend a day.

What struck me the most was that, as the movies progress, Romero starts looking more favorably on the zombies and more cynically toward (living) people.

In Night of the Living Dead, it’s pretty clear that the zombies are evil and need to be killed. The undead are always attacking and the living have to defend themselves. There’s really no middle ground, it’s kill or be killed (or be killed again) for both sides. Romero has always had a cynical streak, as pointed out by the African-American protagonist being shot and killed by a redneck posse at the end of the movie. But at least Romero suggests that the struggle to stay alive is worth it.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) picks up where Night if the Living Dead left off, just transporting us 10 years ahead. All hell is breaking loose and a new band of survivors has taken refuge in a shopping mall. The zombies still attack mindlessly, but often disposing of the undead is more about sport than survival. The living taunt the zombies and pick them off shooting gallery-style. Eventually the little group clears the mall of  zombies and seals all the entrances. It’s a perfect refuge from the undead, but not from the motorcycle gang that forces their way into the mall. The zombies still pose a significant threat, but the marauding bikers are way more dangerous.

Then we jump ahead to Day of the Dead (1985). A small group of scientists and soldiers are trapped in a secure research facility, surrounded on all sides by zombies and may very well be the last living people on Earth. The scientists are experimenting on some zombies they have captured, trying to find a cure for the zombism. The soldiers are there to provide security and relish each opportunity to harass and torture the undead. Maniacal Dr. Logan has made a breakthrough in his private experiment with one zombie, affectionately named Bub, able to curb his zombie instincts and form a bond. But the soldiers, seeing themselves as an authority unto themselves, take control of the facility and show no hesitation to take the lives of their fellow living. It is Bub that eventually kills the soldier in command, the zombie exacting revenge for the evils committed against both the undead and the living.

It’s then 20 years until the next movie, Land of the Dead (2005). The living are now vastly outnumbered by the dead and have managed to secure the city of Pittsburgh from the zombies. Absent any real law and order, a feudal system as taken hold in the city, with a wealthy few, and the masses impoverished. The zombies have learned to stay away from the city, as coming near results in either death (again) or being tormented and used for sport. Although the living are relatively safe and unprovoked by the zombies, they never miss a chance to kill a few just for fun. Then the zombies start showing some signs of intelligence, and the most aware among them makes a zombie call to action- to advance upon the city. As the living are fighting amongst themselves, the zombies are able to breach the city’s security and make their way to the center of the city, where the upper-class lives. After wreaking their zombie justice on the upper-crust, the undead leave the city, allowing most of the population to survive. The zombies don’t want to kill everyone, they just want to live their (after)lives in peace.

Finally Diary of the Dead (2007) takes us back to the beginning, with a first-person account of the zombie outbreak, only set today. The zombies are always on the attack and the living are just defending themselves, same as with Night of the Living Dead, but some of the characters openly ponder whether or not the living deserve to keep on living. When you get down to brass tacks, who’s really the monster? The movie closes with a video of men shooting zombies that have been tied to a tree, with the narrator asking, “Are we worth saving? You tell me.”

Zombies were once something to fear and made a good argument for cremation, but George Romero seems to be suggesting that maybe zombies aren’t so bad. Can a zombie possess intelligence and control it’s craving for living flesh? He seems to think so. It could be that we’re scared of the zombies because they’re gross and different, so we assume they’re bad. If we took the time to get to know them and treat them like equals, maybe there wouldn’t be a zombie apocalypse, just some new, ugly neighbors.

I’m not a big fan of trying to read allegory into movies, so as to what the zombies are meant to represent, I’ll leave that to others. But as far as zombies go, maybe it’s finally time we start thinking of them as an alternative lifestyle rather than the embodiment of evil.

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A week after X-Men Origins: Wolverine saw the biggest opening of 2009, Star Trek sidles right up behind it in second place. It hauled in $75,204,289 for the weekend, my prediction off a minuscule $5 million, easily becoming the biggest opening in the franchise and will probably become the overall highest-grossing next weekend. But what does that really mean? It’s not like this Star Trek has a lot to do with anything that has come before. If it weren’t for the names of people, places, and things, you could probably get away with calling this movie a lot of things other than Star Trek without anyone noticing. That’s my problem with this tidal wave of remakes: the movies themselves aren’t much to sneeze at. They’re doing little more than capitalizing on a name to draw an audience. I wonder what would happen if some of these movies were released with different titles. Would Last House on the Left be noted for it’s originality? Would Star Trek have kicked off it’s own string of sequels? But thinking on that is probably as futile as trying to count how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Star Trek as we know it is dead. Long live Star Trek.

Next Day Air, the other new release (in case you forgot), was most likely the recipient of people turned away from sold out Star Trek shows. That’s the a reasonable explanation for it’s $4,111,043 take this weekend. My prediction was only off $300,000 on this bad boy. I guess it didn’t do so bad as it had the third highest per theater average in the top 15 movies and finished in sixth place overall.

Wolverine continued the trend of movies with huge opening weekends crashing back to Earth like a five year-old off a Halloween sugar high. It made $26.4 million, off 69% from last weekend. That is a rather precipitous drop for a second weekend. I see it translating to a hype-fueled opening weekend followed by a weekend fueled by the people that wanted to see it the opening weekend but didn’t. If people were raving and recommending, I would have expected a smaller drop.

If you thought Wolverine’s 69% was bad, Battle for Terra (released last week, won’t blame you for forgetting) saw the box office fall off 84%. On the flip-side, Watchmen had the biggest gain of the weekend, up 81% from last week. Yeah it only made $112,482, but that percentage looks impressive. Say, that’s kind of like the movie itself: looks impressive, but critical inspection reveals there’s less there than you thought.

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