Spider-Man 3 dropped 60% in its second weekend but still earned an estimated $60 million and dominated the weekend box office once again. 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to 28 Days Later, the film that re-defined the zombie movie for contemporary audiences, beat out the Jane Fonda/Lindsay Lohan generational comedy Georgia Rule to finish a distant second with an estimated $10 million.
Hard as it may be to believe, a 60% drop is not necessarily a bad thing, especially with the potent marketing campaign and the saturation screenings that put Spider-Man 3 on over 10,000 screens. Even with its 60% fall-off, Spider-Man 3 still had the fourth best second weekend in history and its ten-day total of $242.1 million trails only Pirates of the
Still, Spidey 3's lead over its predecessors is diminishing and it is highly possible in view of the stiff competition it will face in the coming weeks that it will end up the lowest grossing Spider-Man yet domestically. However the wall-crawler's foreign audience appears to be growing and it is still likely that Spidey's foreign box office, which is already up to $379.6 million, will make it the highest grossing film in the franchise worldwide. Though it will have a hard time reaching the $1 billion mark, $900 million is very possible and that would put it well ahead of Spider-Man 1 ($821,708,551) and Spidey 2 ($783,766,341).
Competition at the box office comes not just from blockbusters like Spider-Man 3, but also from a surfeit of releases in any one genre. Just as the plethora of computer-animated feature films in 2006 depressed that genre's previously sterling box office record, so the 14 horror films that have already debuted in 2007 undoubtedly hurt 28 Weeks Later, which has earned a sparkling 70% 'fresh' rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Website. Good word of mouth could still provide 28 Weeks Later with a solid theatrical showing, but even if that doesn't work out, look for the film to do well on DVD. Fox Atomic Comic has published 28 Days Later: The Aftermath, a graphic novel collection which includes stories written by horror maven Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) that are set before and after the action chronicled in the first film in the franchise as well as a story that leads up to the events in 28 Weeks Later.
Other genre films have also had their problems in the highly competitive marketplace. David Goyer's The Invisible slipped to #7 and will have to hold up well to finish much above $20 million. The Invisible is still likely to make money whereas Paramount's Next, which stars Nicholas Cage and is based on a Philip K. Dick story, fell to #9 and will likely gross less than The Invisible even though its budget was several times as large.