In the summer of the 'Threequel' it should come as no surprise that the third movie in the Robert Ludlum-derived Bourne series easily won the weekend box office with an August record opening estimated at $70.18 million, the best debut yet for a film in the fast-paced thriller cycle starring the extremely likable Matt Damon. Audiences must have taken plenty of Dramamine to endure director Paul Greenglass's nausea-inducing shaky hand-held camera style, but with no other action picture competition among the top ten films except the 8th place Transformers movie (which earned an estimated $6 million during its fifth weekend) The Bourne Ultimatum easily won the box office crown.
The Simpson's Movie dropped 65% in its second frame (a testament, as was its stellar opening, to the efficacy of Fox's unorthodox marketing campaign), but still took second place handily with an estimated $25.6 million and ran its domestic cumulative to $128.6 million in ten days. The film is doing even better overseas where it earned $96.9 million last weekend, the largest overseas haul ever for a U.S. comedy (who says comedy doesn't translate?) and that total is even more impressive considering that it is yet to open in a number of major markets such as Italy, Russia, Japan and Mexico. Opening the same weekend as the Transformers in the
Disney's live action version Underdog managed to do slightly better than the rather modest expectations that most analysts had for it by pulling in an estimated $12 million. The kid-targeted picture had the third highest per screen average in the top ten (trailing only Bourne and The Simpsons). Underdog fared better than the other kids' release, the live action Bratz movie, which finished in tenth place.
The new Harry Potter film fell from third to sixth, but still earned nearly $10 million to bring its U.S. total to over $260 million (it has made double that overseas already). The new Potter flick, along with Transformers, Ratatouille, which finished eleventh and raised its cumulative to $188.2 million, and Live Free or Die Hard, which ended up at #13, each lost over 800 theaters. With films such as Ratatouille and Die Hard still drawing in their sixth week of release and Transformers hanging in the top ten during its fifth outing, there is real competition for screens.
The domestic box office in July was up a solid 15% over July 2006, and with plenty of new films lined up to open in the coming weeks, even films that are doing fairly well are going to have a hard time hanging on to their screens (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry has earned $91 million in just 17 days and finished fourth this weekend in spite of being booted out of 212 theaters). This box office crunch could have an effect both on the eventual cumulative totals of films such as Transformers, Ratatouille and Live Free or Die Hard and could also tend to keep the opening grosses down for any new films such as Stardust, which opens next weekend, simply because they won't be on as many screens as they might have if they had opened earlier in the year -- just another reason why the studios put so much effort into securing the best opening weekends years in advance of a film's release (see 'Next Shrek in 2010').