Box Office - 'Indiana Jones' Whips Up $126 Million in Four Days

Because it's an otherwise boring holiday weekend, the big story is the box office performance of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We've been updating you daily on its estimated total, and while we were off-base after Thursday's $25 million opening, we corrected ourselves and the course of the film after seeing Friday's $31 million estimate. In fact, yesterday we indicated that Indy would probably make around $34 million on Saturday, another $31 million on Sunday and $22.5 million on Monday, giving us a five-day total of $143 million. Now the actual estimates are in from Box Office Mojo, and we were a little low, but nothing close to the discrepancies over the past few weeks. With $37 million on Saturday and $34 million on Sunday, Indiana Jones has passed the $125 million mark in four days, and while it won't break any records and will, in fact, probably fall a little short of expectations on opening weekend and possibly its entire run, we are looking at a $145 - $152 million weekend. Indy would need a little more than $23 million on Monday to cross the sesquicentennial mark (and for the record, I spelled that right the first time...although it was a guess), which would give it a fair chance to overtake Iron Man in June to become the year's top dog at the box office.  The interesting news is that, after Monday, Indiana Jones will have outgrossed the big movies of the past weekends combined! Speed Racer continues to flop, while Prince Caspian is also struggling, looking at holding off Iron Man by maybe $5 million over the entire five-day weekend. The question for Iron Man is, can it make another $50 million? If so, it'll be the first $300 million earner since Transformers. It's looking like a stronger possibility than ever, but I wouldn't call it a lock. Oh, and congratulations to The Visitor and director Thomas McCarthy and star Richard Jenkins. For the second week in a row, the quiet, modestly-distributed human drama has placed in the bottom of the top ten, and it's never even played in more than 300 theaters. It's a great film, excellent summer counterprogramming, and it seems to be working.