Box Office - 'Marley' Hits $100 Million, Wins Again

I'll be curious to see what happens next for the top four movies of the week. For the second straight week, Marley & Me won the box office, with Bedtime Stories, Benjamin Button, and Valkyrie filling out the rest of the top four. With no new competition this week, the films were able to put up pretty strong numbers, with Marley & Me topping $100 million in ten day and earning another $24 million over the New Year's weekend, according to Box Office Mojo.

In fact, all four of last week's new releases are primed to make $100 million, as Valkyrie has already made $60 million and will be close to $75 or $80 million in another week to ten days. But I'm curious because there is competition coming; there are 14 wide releases hitting theaters within the next three weeks. It's not so much the quality of the competition - it is early January, after all - but the sheer numbers of movies that could make a movie like Bedtime Stories fade sooner than it normally would. We'll have expansions by several Oscar movies, including Gran Torino, The Reader, and the re-released Dark Knight, as well as horror movies The Unborn and My Bloody Valentine that are being aggressively promoted. Speaking of Oscar movies, they constituted nine of the top ten finishers this weekend on a per-screen basis. Defiance led the way with a whopping $60,000 per screen, about ten times as much as Marley. Gran Torino looks like it's on its way to being a huge hit; the Clint Eastwood film has made just under $10 million in four weeks...in a total of 84 theaters.

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Box Office - Second Verse, Same as the First

There are no new nationwide releases this weekend in theaters, meaning we're probably going to see a repeat of last week's top movies at the box office. Marley & Me has continued to do surprising business and will be over the $100 million by the end of the first weekend of 2009.

In fact, if we step back a little bit, everything in the top five is a little surprising. In addition to Marley, you've got Benjamin Button, which came out of the gates with a $39 million weekend and will probably be over $80 million by next Monday. That's good news for everyone involved, because three-hour David Fincher movies don't sound like box office gold. It still has a long way to go to make money, but as the only film like it at all on the schedule for months and months, the Golden Globes and the Oscar nominations will help create more buzz for it, keeping ticket sales afloat well into February. Bedtime Stories was the movie most prognosticators had winning the Christmas weekend: It's a family flick, it's got Adam Sandler. But it opened in third place over the four-day holiday, and though it's beating Button on the weekdays so far this week, it probably won't overtake the film this weekend, simply because it's an opening weekend kind of curiosity. People still want to see Button and will find ways to do it.

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Box Office - Big Debuts for 'Marley' and 'Benjamin Button'

As we always say after a holiday weekend, keep in mind that these numbers are slightly inflated because of the extra day, but there are still some pretty impressive figures over the Christmas four-day span, most notably the top film in the country and an Oscar front-runner.

Marley & Me is, point blank, a big ol' hit. It not only won a weekend it wasn't necessarily expected to but it did so with consistent numbers all weekend and a $51 million debut, according to Box Office Mojo . Assuming the film cost under $100 million, which is a safe assumption, Marley is going to make a bunch of money and could prove to be a great elixir for both Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, both of whom could use a major blockbuster. Bedtime Stories finished the three-day weekend in second place, slightly off the mark in terms of its pre-weekend projections, but $38 million is certainly a good enough debut, especially considering that this is the last film aimed at families for the next few weeks. It ought to have fairly strong business until mid-January. I think everyone is surprised by how well The Curious Case of Benjamin Button performed; usually, Oscar movies don't start this strong. The Brad Pitt drama actually made slightly more money than Bedtime Stories over the four-day session, but that's because of a much bigger Christmas day than was expected. Still, I think everyone involved has to be happy about a $39 million start for the $130 million epic.

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Box Office - No to 'Yes,' 'Seven Pounds' Weighed Down

The news was not that good at the top of the weekend box office, with Yes Man and Seven Pounds combining to barely beat the effort of last week's winner, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which itself was something of a minor disappointment.Jim Carrey's new comedy led the way with $18 million, according to Box Office Mojo, while Will Smith's Seven Pounds opened to just over $16 million in business. The animated Tale of Despereaux opened in third place, although its $10 million debut is a lot closer to earlier projections than the soft openings by Seven Pounds and Yes Man.The real success stories right now are the films that will challenge for Oscar and Golden Globe hardware. The per-screen averages for Frost/Nixon, Doubt, Gran Torino, and now The Wrestler continue to dwarf the numbers put up by the wide releases and now, for the first time, Oscar frontrunner Slumdog Millionaire has cracked the top ten. Next week, the box office landscape will be entirely different, with five new wide releases and a number of expansions, so it will probably take on an even more Oscar-friendly look.The Top Five: 1 - Yes Man ($18.1 million)
2 - Seven Pounds ($16 million)
3 - The Tale of Despereaux ($10.5 million)
4 - The Day the Earth Stood Still ($10.1 million)
5 - Four Christmases ($7.7 million)

Box Office - A Bad Weekend for Smith and Carrey

Another flatter-than-expected weekend at the box office awaits us, as the Friday estimates would indicate that no movie will make as much as $20 million from Friday to Sunday. Box Office Mojo reports a fairly close race between Jim Carrey's Yes Man and Will Smith's Seven Pounds through one day, although it's more likely to widen between now and Monday morning.

Still, the way the numbers are now - Yes Man at about $6.5 million and Seven Pounds roughly a million bucks behind - suggests that neither film is really doing the kind of business anyone projected. If you extrapolate those numbers, Yes Man has a shot to get to $20 million, and I actually expect it to do better business today than yesterday, but it's not a guarantee by any means.Will Smith, on the other hand, is looking at his worst debut since Ali opened to under $15 million seven years ago. Again, it will do slightly better today than yesterday, but with the Sunday drop-off, it will probably land on about $16 million by the time the receipts are counted.We project both films to open over $20 million, with Yes Man in the $24 - $26 million range. I know this might be shocking, but there are a lot of films this fall that have received mixed to poor reviews and have then gone out and laid an egg at the box office. Coincidence? Or does it mean that, especially in a tough economy, people might be listening to critics?

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