By Todd Allen

While worlds of comics and movies were all in San Diego, the rest of the country still thought about going to movies.  The latest Ice Age made a solid, if not spectacular, with $46M.  Easy pickings for the only major release of the week.  Here are the weekend estimates, according to Box Office Mojo:

1 Ice Age: Continental Drift $46,000,000
2 The Amazing Spider-Man $35,000,000
3 Ted $22,147,000
4 Brave $10,695,000
5 Magic Mike $9,030,000
6 Savages $8,735,000
7 Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection $5,600,000
8 Katy Perry: Part of Me $3,735,000
9 Moonrise Kingdom $3,662,000
10 Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted $3,500,000
11 To Rome with Love $2,539,000
12 Marvel’s The Avengers $1,287,000

All things considered, this was a fairly stable week.  Most drops were between 40-47%, with the smaller Moonrise Kingdom and To Rome With Love dropping in the 18%-19% range.  Ted was also looking particularly good, dropping only31.2%

The Amazing Spider-Man is up to $200.9M.  Add in foreign box office at you’re at $521.4M (though I don’t think foreign total is current.)  Keep in mind the Avengers had a $207M opening weekend, so in 13 days, Spidey still hasn’t quite done what the Avengers did in 3.  Still, $200M with the work week to go is a good haul and overseas ticket sales have been strong.

Speaking of the Avengers, that film has finally dropped below 1000 screens, all the way down to 747.  It still topped a million dollars in its eleventh weekend.  Probably, it has a large drop-off next week.  Three superhero movies out at once.  A strange thought, isn’t it?

The big shake up this week is the highly anticipated debut of The Dark Knight Rises.  Yes, the one there have been TV commercials touting advance sales for a few weeks now.  Dark Knight is expected to debut on 4,375+ screens.  Just a handful of screens more than Spidey… and Spidey was everywhere.  That kind of a debut is going to redistribute the screens drastically.  Completely removing the early summer’s SF/F slate of Avengers, MIB3, Snow White and Thor, Prometheus, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter would not add up to enough screens to accommodate Dark Knight Rises.

There’s a legitimate question of whether Dark Knight will debut higher than Avengers.  There’s a question of whether it will suck the life out of all the films around it like Avengers did.  There’s the question of whether the movie goer goes to something else if Dark Knight is sold out.  Will Spider-Man thrive as substitute goods or will it be stepped on.

Wait and see, but next weekend’s box office looks to be VERY interesting.

1 COMMENT

  1. “Three superhero movies out at once. A strange thought, isn’t it?”

    Not really. Back in Summer 2008:
    May 2 – Iron Man
    June 13 – The Incredible Hulk
    June 27 – Wanted
    July 4 – Hancock
    July 11 – Hellboy 2
    July 18 – The Dark Knight

    Box office rankings the weekend July 18-20:
    Dark Knight 1, Hancock 3, Hellboy 5, Wanted 8, Hulk 15, Iron Man 16.

    (I remember this weekend distinctly – as we were walking into the theater showing Dark Knight, I made mention of the fact that the one theater was showing 4 comic book movies at the same time.)