WEEKEND Box-Office Projections 5/7: MI3 Disappointment

[Carlson2005]

Well, the tickets at that cinema had just gone up from £6.50 in the evening shows to £7.30, which made it worse - though the Odeon Leicester Square is now charging a staggering £17.50 from the week The Da Vinci Code opens. But as you say, with new DVDs so cheap, anything borderline I don't bother risking going to the cinema to see these days.

I noticed that Variety were reporting that MI3 did way below expectations in Germany and France this weekend.

[romanD]

17.50??!!!! ridiculous... who goes to the movies over there??? seriously???

yeah, the BO was pretty bad last weekend, but that's because we had a marvellously sunny weekend, the first this year, so everybody went to the lakes, sea, rivers... it's just bad timing for MI3...

[Carlson2005]

The odd thing is that last year, box-office takings bucked the trend and went up slightly in the UK - mind you, that could have had something to do with the prices. You can get cheap seats in the afternoon, and the Odeon Leicester Square is the most expensive cinema in the country - a full £10 ($18.50!!!) more than the average - but there's definitely the feeling that cinema owners are just complacent about standards. However, one thing it's practically impossible to get anyone in the Uk to see in a cinema is a British film - unless it's James Bond or a Ricard Curtis romcom.

We had fairly good weather this weekend (drizzle and rain since, though), and still MI3 did $10m over here. Possibly because people over here don't take movie stars that seriously to begin with, so Cruise's antics didn't exactly shatter many illusions.

[romanD]

same here.. German movies usually bomb big time. But that has to do with their pretentiousness, the bad quality and the lack of German stars.

British movies are pretty good usually.. loved SHAUN OF THE DEAD... wished something that funny and original would have been made over here!

[Carlson2005]

Shaun was a surprise local hit - possibly because it was entertaining for a change, possibly because it was one of the few British films that didn't import a deadbeat US 'star' with no box-office pull to try to boost its overseas sales prospects - but we have more than our share of tenth-rate movies over here. After Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels you couldn't move for unwatchable no-budget gangster movies, while we have a huge number of pretentious or bad dramas (not least because of lottery funding and tax breaks). and that's not mentioning the Dov Siemens' inspired make-it-over-the-weekend-and-pay-for-it-on-credit-cards 'guerrilla filmmaking efforts that are lucky to get a weeks' play in a single screen. As a result, the UK is the second-largest overseas market after Japan, yet lags behind almost every other country in the box-office share stakes for its own movies.

That said, I've noticed over the past few years that conspicuously few German films make it to these shores these days.

[AndyDursin]

Actual weekend gross was $47 mil, not $48.

It also dropped 72% on Monday, which is huge even for a weekday...