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Thursday
04Sep2008

Fearless Forecast - Nic Cage 'Dangerous' Enough

DateThursday, September 4, 2008 at 11:51AM
There's not a whole lot to talk about with this weekend's box office - thanks, Bangkok Dangerous - so we're going to take some time to reflect on summer, and in particular, our own predictions we made throughout Hollywood's biggest season.

Overall, we did pretty well with our weekly predictions. Our summer overview was not successful at all, but we did that at the very beginning of May and it's harder to project some of that stuff months away. Still: Who would've thought the X-Files sequel would make about $30 million? Or that Prince Caspian would be come up so short? The Dark Knight at half a billion dollars? Nobody thought that.

But we had some pretty good success, predicting Sex and The City would beat Indiana Jones in the last weekend in May (that was an unpopular decision). We said Wall-E wouldn't run away with its opening weekend race against Wanted, and that was true. Really, outside of May, which was a tricky month with two unpredictable big releases - Caspian and Speed Racer - our percentage was very high.

We cautioned against claims saying The Dark Knight would make $200 million in its opening weekend - we actually suggested it might not break Spider-Man's debut mark, and we weren't too far off in estimating that its opening weekend ceiling would be about $155 (our real number was $147 million, I think). Of course, we also said it would be the fastest movie ever to $300 million before it was released and after it got halfway to the Titanic milestone, I believe we were the first to peg its final tally well into the $500 million range and back that claim up statistically. We pretty much nailed that, at least through mid-October, or so it would appear. We'll see if Warner Bros. decides to put the movie in more theaters for a Halloween last hurrah.

And it was a lot of fun breaking down the numbers this summer, but now the sobering truth sets in: The box office is dead for two weeks.

It really started two weeks ago, when the big movie was Death Race. That didn't do a lot. Last week was Babylon A.D., a very expensive flop. And while both of those movies had some competition, this week it's all about Nic Cage and Bangkok Dangerous.

Why in the hell is this movie essentially getting a weekend to itself? No other major new releases are out there and the ones still in theaters have all lost steam. It doesn't make any sense to me. Still, I don't expect Bangkok Dangerous to run away with the box office. Limp, maybe. But it won't be running.

This is just more justification for the studios to release a big, big film on Labor Day. It would have cleaned up last weekend and this weekend would have been a cake walk. I think Tropic Thunder would have been the ideal choice here because it's geared at the young male crowd, many of whom would've been stuck on college campuses those two weekends.

The Top Five:

1 - Bangkok Dangerous ($10 million)

2 - Tropic Thunder ($7 million)

3 - The Dark Knight ($6 million)

4 - Traitor ($4.5 million)

5 - The House Bunny ($4 million)

AuthorColin Boyd | | in , , , , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment |

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