Wednesday, December 21, 2005

King Kong

Well, it looks like Peter Jackson is going to be wearing a t-shirt instead of me. His t-shirt will read "I AM POKEMON'S BITCH" since the Wednesday opening of King Kong was only the ninth best in history and below the opening for Pokemon.

Ouch.

I will repeat this one more time: it's a three hour film about a gorilla. No matter what phrase is inserted after "It's a three hour film...", there are plenty of people who have already stopped listening.

Universal was crowing about a probable $100 million dollar opening week (Wed-Sun) for King Kong. Um, try $66 million, which is nothing short of a catastrophe after all the pre-release hype the movie received. My favorite quote is from Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal:
Shmuger noted how Kong enjoyed a bigger Saturday bump over Friday (40 percent) than any of the Lord of the Rings pictures or Titanic. "It suggests growing momentum behind the numbers," he added. "I'm feeling incredibly bullish."

My man, I hate to Scrooge you, but I did a little research. The numbers two through ten films at the box office last weekend had a dropoff in per-theatre revenue from Sunday to Monday of 51.7%. What's pretty remarkable is the consistency of this pattern. Take a look (numbers two through ten, in order):
-52.6%
-51.8%
-54.2%
-53.9%
-50.6%
-47.1%
-51.8%
-36.5%
-49.0%
-51.7%

That's a very tight pattern, with no film having a greater dropoff than 54.2%.

So what was King Kong's dropoff? -63.7%.

I'm sure there's some way to spin that, but as far as I can tell, that's not bullish. Unless I'm dyslexic.

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