Well, summer has come to a close and Exhibitor Relations tweets out the bad news saying the 2012 summer box office is estimated to end around $4.28 billion, down 2.73% from 2011 with ticket sales off 3.45% from last year. Yikes, the number I’m looking at there is the nearly 1% additional drop in ticket sales as studios are, more and more, relying on inflated IMAX and 3D ticket prices to earn their money back. Not a good sign.
As for this weekend, at #1 was the PG-13, demon box thriller The Possession, pulling in $17.7 million and a “B” CinemaScore, which isn’t too bad considering the few critics that were given the chance to see it by Lionsgate before its release weren’t exactly high on it. Of course, a “B” from audiences won’t be enough to keep this small time thriller in theaters for too long.
In second was Lawless, which brought in $9.8 million after opening on Wednesday and pulling in a total of $11.8 million for the five-day. The film earned a middling “B+” CinemaScore from audiences indicating it won’t likely have very long legs at the box-office, which isn’t much of a surprise, but looking over the recently released wide openers it’s a shame many are missing out on a pretty decent film.
And I can’t stop talking about the week’s new releases without mentioning The Oogieloves In BIG Balloon Adventure, largely because I added this film to the database only because I thought it would do some business at the box-office… you know, being a stupidly named kid’s movie and all. However, it tanked and is now the record holder for the worst per theater average for a film opening in over one thousand theaters, besting 2011’s Creature, which averaged $217 from 1,507 theaters.
Oogieloves, which was budgeted at $20 million, brought in $448,131 from 2,160 theaters for a $207 per theater average and a five-day total of just $673,719. Looking at the comments from my Friday box-office post one commenter who works in a theater wrote, “I work at the local movie theater and since Wednesday we’ve sold a total of 13 tickets to Oogieloves. We’ve only had to clean that theater three times in a week.” Facts from the field folks… that’s what I’m bringing you!
In other news, The Avengers and Pixar’s Brave swept back into theaters this weekend for a brief Labor Day weekend run before hitting DVD and Blu-ray. The two films split one screen in most territories in over 1,700 theaters across the nation with Avengers adding $1.7 million to its total and Brave getting a $1.3 million bump. Their respective domestic totals now sit at $619.5 million and $231.7 million. The worldwide total for The Avengers is now over $1.5 billion.
Looking forward to next week things aren’t looking any rosier as we have the widest openers The Words (2,700 theaters) and The Cold Light of Day (1,500 theaters) along with limited releases which include Bachelorette (40 theaters), The Eye of the Storm and [REC] 3: Genesis hitting theaters and only a couple of those in a wide capacity. Any one care to pick a favorite to finish #1 a week from now?
Thanks goes out to ERCBoxoffice and Gitesh Pandya for their Twitter facts that contributed to this post.
