ENCHANTED Jumps Ahead of Hitman

Actually, the movie This Christmas has the highest per screen average...making it the the true number one film. The leading movie (Enchanted) on paper, is at more than double the amount of locations, making it falsely appear to be doing much better box office than its nearest competition.

As for Hitman...they were crazy to go with practically a no name actor...over Vin Diesal.

BTW...I just saw XXX: State Of The Union...and I must confess, although it was a mess...especially at the beginning...it actually managed to redeemed itself and became a hugely entertaining movie with some sequences and stunts that I guarantee you that you have never seen anything like this before on screen. I must admit though, the movie could have used a better lead actor...someone who is, in fact, a real actor. Eventually, I began to root for Ice Cube but let's face it, a truly great actor could have brought this movie to a higher level of execution and esteem. And then there are several clumsy moments in the early part of the film, like Ice Cube jumping a speed boat over a standing bridge and onto a freeway...and various other rough moments that needed to be refined. But all in all, once they got back on track...the film put the original XXX to shame. Again, with some easy fixes and tweeks, this is the film that Vin Diesal should have done.

And lastly, Industrial Light And Magic provided some fun special effects which and pretty outstanding in the final sequence.

Oh, and PS--the movie The Condemned is very boring...over long, and lacking in laughs, fun and moments to cheer the hero, an x-special ops soldier, played by Stone Cold. In spite of the fact that the movie is technically well done, and its director competent...the film is just plain dull. That, and its end sequence, where one of the villains turns the tables on a broadacst crew, going Columbine on them, should have been used in the second act of the film...leaving our hero and the tv producer's girlfriend to square-off with the rape frenzied villain in the nearby island jungles. The female should have become his love interest, and his wife back home, should have been revised as just a concerned ex who he eventually made his peace with after she moved on with another man. This would have given Stone Cold someone to romance, protect, make love to...and truly interact with during the course of the film, hence making it flow better overall.

Metawater that's faulty logic you're using to designate your true number 1. Look at No Country for Old Men as an example. As the release got progressively wider the per screen average dropped accordingly. So a wider release doesn't necessarily equate a larger b.o. With a wider release it probably would've done about the same with a much smaller per screen average, considering that it wasn't selling out. And not to give the distributor too much credit but they do know where certain movies will have a better draw, so they release it in the markets they expect the movie to do well.
By the way if anyone is going to the movies this weekend and there are no kids involved I would like to recommend "No Country for Old Men" and "The Mist". I thought they were both really good and both endings will leave you thinking and talking

I didn't come up with this standard, the industry did. They use the per screen average to judge a film's legs. However, a massive wide release of a film can be used to dupe people into believing that a film like 30 Days Of Night is a hit...when Why Did I Get Married had a drastically higher per screen average that week. If they were at an equal amounts of theatres...Why Did I Get Married would have officially been number one for two weeks straight...and beaten the pants off of 30 Days Of Night--a movie by the way, that slipped into a hole and disappeared just one weekend after its release.

The more I see metalwater responding on everything and saying something was better/different than the reviewer it makes me not want to read these comments anymore. Saying that you have an idea is one thing but blabbering about it in all the different news updates is just sloppy. Whether it be that you think you have a better idea...we are suppose to be commenting on the news/reviews, not giving a rundown about some piece of crap that will never see the light of day. Anyway flame away metal, cause we know you can......

It seems to me most of the methods used to compute whether a film is a success or not are flawed.
If a movie opens on only two screens and is sold out for all showings on both, that will give it a high per screen average. But does this make it a hit? No.
If a movie opens on every screen in the country but only half fills them this will give it a low per screen average but a high gross. Does this make it a hit? As far as the studio will be concerned, yes. But these are still half empty houses.
It used to be that crossing the $100 million barrier was the sign of a hit, but now certain films are considered a flop if they don't. Ever higher ticket prices will do that, after all.
The figures that matter are the number of tickets sold. That way you also get to compare the popularity of something from today against something from yesteryear. Those kind of figures are inflation-proof, so why is that system not used? Beats me.
And the financial figures that matter are the revenue vs budget (including promotion) comparisons. I know many movies don't have their budget figures released, and no wonder. If a film does $200m that looks great, but not if its budget was $250m.

A higher per screen average with far fewer screens just means that the people who were going to see the film anyway were crammed into fewer theaters.

Several things to consider - the fewer screens, the fewer cities, the fewer more rural areas get the film. Rural areas have smaller theaters, so when one screen seats between 50 and 100 people, it can't pull a per screen average that compares to a screen that can seat 600. Also, this is why some people shouting "the theater was PACKED" might be meaningless if they went to a 100 seat screen, where another guy decrying "the theater was EMPTY" is just as meaningless when the movie was showing on 3 screens in that theater and each screen sat over 400.

Also, if its on fewer screens, most of those screens are in larger population areas. If Chicago gets the movie only on 1 screen that theater will more likely fill up than if the film showed on a dozen screens across Chicago.

The number isn't meaningless, but really is only useful in comparing apples to apples. (2 films both opened on 2000 screens, THEN the per screen average comparison means something.)

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As far as success or failure based on a film's cost versus its box office take, that has many flaws too.

Financially a film that cost $1 million dollars to make that pulls in $10 million is a huge success, cost versus benefits wise.

A film that cost $300 million to make that only pulls in $250 million is a financial failure, cost versus benefits wise.

But really, looking at it another way, that $1 million dollar film was seen by next to nobody while the $300 million dollar film was seen by MANY people.

"Success" depends on what you want to gauge. Profitability or number of people who went and saw it. The two do not always go together.

I have to disagree with metalwater's assessment of how "legs" are determined. A high per-screen showing may be a good indicator of "legs" when the movie is involved in a platform or rolling release, where the number of theaters are increased each week as word of mouth gets out. This works for small movies like Little Miss Sunshine, Brokeback Mountain, and An Inconvenient Truth. However This Christmas is not involved in a platform release - it was released to about 1800 theaters, and that will probably be its peak. Its per theater box office is better explained by precise target marketing by the studio and distributor. As others have pointed out, in this case, opening it in more theaters would have likely ended up with approximately the same total box office and a lower per-theater average.

"Legs" are best determined by the second weekend's dropoff (which will be a bit skewed anyway since this is a four-day holiday weekend). As far as Why Did I Get Married vs. 30 Days of Night - we all know that horror movies tend to have big opening weekends and a steep dropoff. But according to the stats at boxofficemojo, 30 Days ran in theaters for five weeks, while WDIGM ran for six weeks. I have no doubt that WDIGM is a box office success (moreso than 30 Days), but I'm not sure how six weeks of release gives WDIGM "legs" while five weeks means 30 Days slipped into "a hole."

Actually, metalwater, I'm rather surprised that you're basing your argument on the per-screen basis. In the past, you've taken the holistic approach of looking at domestic box office, foreign box office, and potential DVD/merchandising sales vs. production/marketing/distribution budgets when analysing a movie's performance. There's certainly nothing wrong with calling This Christmas a success, but Enchanted will ultimately have some advantages that This Christmas will not. Enchanted has a much wider foreign release, and will no doubt clean up when the DVD is released. As for the two movies' "legs," as the multiplexes get more congested with holiday releases, I have a feeling that This Christmas will get nudged out before Enchanted does.

Highest average per screen is a talking point and that's about it.

It's not the industry standard for the "true #1".

The true #1 is the film with the best box office at the end of the day.

Michael Clayton opened up on Oct 5-7 in 15 screens with an average per showing rate of nearly $48,000 per showing.

Good for them. It doesn't stop it from being on only 15 screens and landing in 22nd place for the weekend while The Game Plan began its successful run at the top of the pack.

There's only certain weekends where the highest per screen average actually affects the box office victory in terms of the smaller release beating the bigger release.

Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married is a clear example of that. It was released on 1,000 less theaters then its competition but its average had it beating the other films for that weekend.

In most cases, it's just a talking point though and not a true judge of anything other then a "limited release" film doing well.

Jarrod S.

I'm just so happy that the constant "Hitman" promo commercials seemed to have slacked off. That this turd tanks and everyone involved would die in a fire would make it even better.

I don't know anything about this film, but the weird image of the nerdy bald dude with the billowing red tie and American flag thing was really getting on my nerves. Was that supposed to make him look like a super tough bad ass? Cause he looked hopelessly faggy to me.

"A sinner will become a saint." ??? What was he, some altar boy who got turned out by a priest working for the CIA? What kind of saint has a barcode mark o' the beasty tatted on his skull and kills people with automatic weapons? St Remington of Smith & Wesson?

All the trailers for the film made it look like some Saturday Night Live joke commercial without the punchline at the end.

And how long have they been running basically the same inane tv commercial? Over a month? Aren't there any FCC regulations to prevent them from abusing the public this way?

I'm so sick of seeing the stupid HITMAN commercial I wanna pop a cap in the ass of everyone involved in making the film just because of how much it's gotten on my nerves. I would only see it if it was 90 minutes of someone shoving those gun up the hitman's ass.

Seriously, does that skinny fey bald dude look like he would last five seconds trying to kick ass against any other movie action hero?

What would make me happy with those stupid tv commercials is to see Bruce Willis pop up and shoot him with a hearty "Yippie-o-kiyay muthafukka!"

It's commercials for crap like this that make me wish I had some sort of ad-blocker with a big DO NOT WANT button to stop this madness.

surprised the mist didn't do better, it was pretty good. not as good as darabont's other king movies, but it holds on.