Friday, November 05, 2010

$45 million?

Ms. Nikki Finke gives us the early lowdown on the Box Office weekend:

So now I know why rival studios were e-mailing me all day and claiming that Megamind was underperforming. "The problem was that AMC theaters is having system problems and has no grosses in the system," distributor Paramount told me just now.

The DreamWorks Animation toon looks like it will have a $12.5 million Friday for an estimated $45M weekend ...

By Sunday morning we should know how well DreamWorks Animation's third feature of the year did at your local theater.

... Warner Bros' Due Date [collects] $12M ... Lionsgate's For Colored Girls with $8M ... which is not quite the phenom first thought today. ...

But it will be a pretty sizable weekend, just the same.

Update #1: Rotten Tomatoes gives us Megamind's critical reception.

Update #2: And "Mega" comes in about as predicted:

Megamind ... outsmarted all competition at the weekend box office to take the top spot with $47.7 million.

"Megamind" finished a couple of clicks better than "How to Train to Dragon's" opening last March. DWA has had three solid domestic rollouts for its releases this year. Not bad at all.


Anonymous said...

Saw Megamind yesterday. It's a cute kids cartoon! Go see it.

Anonymous said...

Are the higher ticket costs of 3D keeping some families away from the theater? The increase in revenue from 3D ticket sales seems to be offset by decreased attendance in Dreamworks last several releases, none of which show any remarkable cash gains because they were in 3D. Dragons and Megamind had unremarkable openings and Shrek 4 had the lowest domestic box office take of any of the Shrek's. 3D doesn't seem to be the cash cow that its advocates had prophesied.

Anonymous said...

You're obviously the same person who tries to tag every DreamWorks movie with the 'cute kids cartoon' line. Are you as tedious in person as your repetitive posts indicate?

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Megamind said...

Fuck 405! I be cruisin' down the real cash-flow-road soon enough! You'll see!


Anonymous said...

re: Megamind...

I'm tired of hearing how much money a movie made, as if that were the only barometer for a HIT.

How come the "Numbers" always refer to dollars, not people?

I know dollar benchmarks need to be reached and ticket sales are what's important to studio executives, but I'm not one of them. I'm one of the movie-goers more interested in how good a movie is, not how much it makes.

Tell me how many tickets were sold and how many people went to see it, instead. Count the tickets, not the dollars. If it weren't for the inflated prices for 3D, Megamind might have had a measly $30 Million weekend.

Nobody goes to a movie because it made a lot of money - the movie makes a lot of money because it's good and a lot of people go to see it.

I'd rather be one of three million viewers who went to see this movie, not $15 out of $45 Million.

And if it does make $45 Million at $15 per ticket, that means three million people will have seen it over the three days counted as the weekend. The movie is in almost 4,000 theaters, so that means there were 750 ticket buyers per theater. Over the three day period, that means 250 people per day saw the movie. Not as headline-worthy as $45 million, eh?

Yeah, I know not all theaters had the same numbers, and that kids' prices are lower so there may have been more people in the theaters as a result, but still, I'd find it more interesting knowing how many people went to see the movie.

Anonymous said...

looks like it will land at around 48M which gives it a shot at a total run of 150 - 200M domestic. even though it had less than half the same amount of tickets sold as 2004 incredibles. Despicable me opened much bigger actually. Wonder what happens when potter shows up.

Anonymous said...

What's wrong with calling it a cute kids cartoon? That's what it is. I dropped the kids off today to watch it, and they liked it OK. Thankfully I was able to find a 2D screening, as it was cheaper.

Floyd Norman said...

Bottom line. Animation makes money. End of story.

Anonymous said...

I'm tired of hearing how much money a movie made, because when movies make money, they can finance more paying work for animators.

Oh, wait, I'm not tired of hearing about that.

Anonymous said...

Spin it however you want, the movie is a hit, which is good for the hundreds of (union) animators at DreamWorks, and good for the industry.

What does that make, 5 hit animated films this year already? As a professional animator, that makes me very happy.

Anonymous said...

Also the hundreds of (non-union) animators at PDI, where most of it was done.

Also the overall animation business.

Anonymous said...

To Anonymous 5:24 PM
From Anonymous 11:44 AM
Good point. I softly retract some of what I said because your point is a very good one. Movies that make money can help finance more paying jobs for animators. In that regard, I'm glad to see it made $47.7 Million! Yahoo!

Anonymous said...

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who actually knew what the pay situation was like at PDI. I assume that it's pretty much the same as at DW proper since so much crossing over occurs, but I'm only assuming.

Anonymous said...

In general, most PDI staff make roughly the same weekly rate as DreamWorks staffers, though they generally work more hours for that money. For example, where the union minimum for an entry level position might be $1050 for a 40 hour week in Glendale, the PDI employee will get that rate, but they'll be put on a 50 hour work week, so they're effectively being paid much less.

It's also long been the case that the senior people at DreamWorks, who are all over scale, make significantly more than senior people in Redwood City. That gap has closed somewhat in recent years, but it's still there.

The benefits in Glendale are also somewhat better, though since most people don't pay too much attention to their health and pension benefits, few at PDI are fully aware of this.

Anonymous said...

Anon 6:04:00 PM

"Also the hundreds of (non-union) animators at PDI, where most of it was done."

Hardly, 25+ animators were from glendale, thats nearly half.

Anonymous said...

I didn't know PDI dId megamind. Makes sense with so much production having to move through.

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