Friday saw a 19.9% decrease in box
office revenue over the previous Friday.
The box office saw the welcome return
of the longest running science-fiction franchise in history on Friday
with the debut of the eleventh film in the series, STAR
TREK, which took in an estimated $24M on its first day of release.
Coupled with early screenings on Thursday night, the film has already
earned an estimated $31M. Projecting forward, the film is looking
at a potential $70M opening weekend. To put this in some perspective,
the biggest opening for the film franchise was 1996's STAR
TREK: FIRST CONTACT which earned $30M on its opening weekend
($52M in today's dollars). This is a massive win for distributor
Paramount and the J.J. Abrams production team behind the movie as
they have essentially rebooted the franchise, introduced it to a
new audience, and made it a cool, blockbuster film that is up there
with the big boys of the genre. And in one day, the new film has
earned 75% of the total domestic gross of its predecessor STAR
TREK: NEMESIS ($43M total). Word of mouth has been sensational
on the new Star Trek so look for this one to stick around in the
coming weeks in spite of the competition it faces in the next month.
X-MEN
ORIGINS: WOLVERINE lands in second spot after its stellar opening
last Friday, earning an estimated $8.5M and losing a whopping 75%
of its audience. Word of mouth has definitely kicked in with this
film, and this drop is a major disappointment. The film will obviously
turn a profit but given STAR
TREK has stolen its audience, this film is likely to dwindle
away in the coming weeks, particularly with the remaining summer
movies to be released over the next few months.
GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST actually
held up pretty well on its second Friday, earning an estimated $3.1M
and only dropping 46% from last Friday. Although the film did not
open that big (thus limiting its chances of a big fall), this is
still a reasonable result and may be an effect of counter-programming
to the top 2 films.
Beyonce is still ticking along nicely
with her quiet hit OBSESSED which earned another estimated $2M on
Friday to take its total box office to $51.6M (against a $20M budget).
The same cannot be said for the only
other new opener for Friday NEXT DAY AIR which landed in fifth spot
with an estimated $1.4M. The film is likely to disappear given the
scope of the competition it faces.
The remaining films in the Top 10
for Friday are: 17 AGAIN ($1.2M), THE SOLOIST ($0.9M), FIGHTING
($0.68M), MONSTERS
VS ALIENS ($0.67M), and EARTH ($0.67M).
The North American box office took
in an estimated total of $43.4 million for the whole of Friday 8th
May 2009.
