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Don’t you hate when this happens? Distribution departments at each studio wound up overestimating the weekend box office across the board for the Top 10 movies in release. Everyone is claiming it’s an honest mistake, attributing it to the World Cups finals. But we all know that numbers don’t lie even if studios do:
1. Despicable Me (Universal) Old $60.1M, New $56.3M (-6.3%)
2. Eclipse (Summit) Old $33.4M, New $31.7M (-5%)
3. Predators (Fox) Old $25.3M, New $24.7M (-2.3%)
4. Toy Story 3 (Disney) Old $22M, New $21M (-4.5%)
5. Last Airbender (Paramount) Old $17.1M, New $16.6M (-3%)
6. Grown Ups (Sony) Old $16.4M, New $15.8M (-3.6%)
7. Knight and Day (Fox) Old $7.8M, New: $7.7M (-1.3%)
8. Karate Kid (Sony) Old $5.7M, New $5.3M (-7%)
9. The A-Team (Fox) Old $1.8M, New $1.7M (-5.6%)
10. Cyrus (Fox Searchlight) Old $1.3M, New $1.2M (-7.7%)
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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I guess they shot their wad a little too early. That was a pretty big difference for #1. From 60 to 56. Hmmm…
The dreaded “rounding error.”
Is an intern writing this? Numbers may not lie, but these are ESTIMATES, so not actuals and you can’t underestimate the World Cup. What’s more interesting is the amount that some of the studios overestimated, but you’d have to be a student of box office to get that.
How is it that every studio made the same mistake? Am I to take from this that they all fudge the numbers to make themselves sound more successful? How was all this misoverestimating revealed?
Every Sunday morning the studios release weekend box office estimates. They are “estimates” because Sunday hasn’t happened yet and the studios pretty much guess how much money they will make based on what happened Friday and Saturday. Then on Monday, when all of the real tickets sales are added up, the exact numbers or “actuals” are released. Sometimes the studios fudge the Sunday guesses in obvious ways (eg. to make sure their new release is not narrowly beaten by a holdover) but I don’t see any motive for that here.
Looks like pretty much only Universal had their number wrong…..they really wanted that $60m opening, didn’t they? So they have you say that “every movie” was off, even though most of the top 10 was within normal error ranges?
actually i think anything in this range was a happy surprise for universal, which makes it seem unlikely that they would stretch it. esp. when they are so far ahead from #2.
Studios have a fairly formulaic way of looking at things. What I think they got wrong was the fact that with multiple movies having comparatively strong sales, the box office decay from Friday to Sunday would be expected to be stronger than expected. The soccer match too might have had an impact (but that should have been uniform across all movies) and it should have been stronger for the movies targeting males.
I thought it odd as well. The fact that they all overestimated really does give logic to the World Cup Final drawing viewers away from the theaters. Right on!