EYEING BIGGER B.O., SUPERMAN RETURNS OPENS TWO DAYS EARLIER – NEWSARAMA
EYEING BIGGER B.O., SUPERMAN RETURNS OPENS TWO DAYS EARLIER – NEWSARAMA
EYEING BIGGER B.O., SUPERMAN RETURNS OPENS TWO DAYS EARLIER
With
an admission of looking to see a bigger box office over the Fourth of
July holiday weekend, Warner Bros. has moved the opening date of Superman Returns from Friday, June 30th to Wednesday, June 28th.The longer openeing “weekend” has benefitted many films intial box
office (which can often amount to half of a movie’s domestic box office
take), with War of the Worlds using the six day “weekend” to land a $112.7 million opening.If you’re of the mind to believe it, Entertainment Weekly’s (which, like Warner Bros. is a division of Time Warner) Popwatch offers some other, possible motives to opening two days earlier, and at least one of them starts with the letter “X.”
EW’s Scott Brown writes:
Why the change? Warner Bros. asserts, with typically Soviet
defensiveness, that it had been eyeing June 28 from the very beginning.
(Really? From the beginning? The beginning being… when they set that
June 30 date a year ago?)My colleague Gary Susman cites the chief threat off Supes’ port bow,
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which also sports enormous
fan love and an excellent (if coyly underexposed) trailer.My theory? Read all the fine print about X3′s “record” haul and you’ll
start to get an idea what Warner’s after. Almost every “record” these
days has some sort of asterisk after it — either it’s three-day vs.
five-day, Friday vs. Saturday, Memorial Day vs. any old weekend,
domestic vs. global, 1,000 screens vs. 3,000, or some combination of
factors that casual observers rarely take the time to suss out. The
studios trumpet their winnings, and all we hear is “big” and “record.”
Execs are looking for new hurdles to clear because they want a big
headline and two-page ad in Variety to settle some stockholder nerves
Back East.Don’t get me wrong — this is real money we’re talking about. July 4,
which falls on a Tuesday, is the endpoint of the July Fourth holiday
weekend. Ain’t nothing a studio can do about that, short of renting a
time machine (something Fox tried in the mid-’80s, I believe). But
who’s to say when a holiday begins? Warner figured it out: The July
Fourth holiday begins when Superman Returns. So… let’s have him
return a tad early and give us a bit more weekend to play with,
especially with those pesky pirates hanging around…What does this mean for us? Longer weekends. Don’t know about you, but
when the studios tell me it’s a holiday, I don’t go to work. I’m pretty
sure there’s something in the Constitution about that. There’s
definitely something in my consitution about it.
Technorati Tags: “Superman Returns”
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- The Movie Blog: Superman Returns a “Chick Flick”
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