Weekend Box Office Report for January 12-14

Children of Men is still not playing in my area and chances are it never will. It doesn't look like Dreamgirls is doing as well as the producers thought.

Nice analysis, Jarrod (I gather Karl isn't covering the box office report anymore?), and thanks for the easy-to-read tables.

January usually is a dismal time for the box office. It's hard to pinpoint the chicken and egg effect - yes, people are staying at home, but at the same time January is known to be one of the times of year when studios dump their crap into the theaters. So it's a bit of a vicious cycle.

The two animated movies are bombing, but I can see why Hollywood thought they had a shot - remember this time last year they released Hoodwinked, which was a surprise moderate (and low budget) hit. Obviously the Happily N'ever After folks were hoping for lightning to strike twice but it obviously didn't.

jppintar326, I think Dreamgirls will do fine in the end. Its box office only decined 6% from the previous week, which usually indicates good publicity and word-of-mouth. After next weekend, the Oscar nominees will be announced, and if it fare well there it will likely do steady business through the end of February. This is why those other three movies listed above are expanding next weekend, to take advantage of any Oscar buzz (and I really hope that my local theater is one of those 500 that Pan's Labyrinth is expanding to).

Thanks for the compliments, Snally. Yep, I'll be covering them from now on because I'm assuming Karl has his hands more than full running everything else on this site. Besides, I've loved talking box office trends for years...:-)



Which reminds me, if you or any of our fellow Maniacs have any suggestions on what you'd like to talk about in "talking points", don't hesitate to shoot the suggestion my way.

I also hope Pan's Labyrinth expands into my area. I finally got see CoM a couple days ago and I thought it was fantastic. I've heard Pan's is also quite the film and I pray I get to see it in theaters. I missed the Fountain, but I'll take two of these three movies.

Excellent chart format by the way. I also like the general analysis too.

I heard "Night at the Museum" was up for Best Picture...

...starring Ben Stiller in a museum released in December of 2006.

Nice writeup, Jarrod.

Keep up the quality. All the columns should be this well written.

Saw Children of Men this weekend. Excellent movie! Definitely not your Happy Popcorn movie. It's in a world so desolate and sad that you can almost see it coming around the corner for real. And one shining bit of hope that could give inspiration to everbody. All the characters are well defined, and are, well, characters, with interesting personalities. The violence in it is very shocking and realistic, similar to Saving Pvt. Ryan. All I could thing during those scenes is this is probably about 1/10 as bad as it is in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm surprised Alpha Dog didn't do that well with the way they've been hyping it. The same for Arthur & the Invisibles.
And like everyone else - excellent article, analysis, and charts, Jarrod.

"Children of Men" puts the top five to shame.

You know whe I first read about Night at the museum a year ago, I thought, what a dumb idea, but I was 185.7 million dollars wrong.

Actually, I saw Night at the Museum this afternoon (I had some time on my hands while my car was getting serviced) and it's a fun little romp. It's obviously very much in the vein of Jumanji and Zathura, and seemed to be very popular with the family crowd. In fact, today was a school holiday, and the theater was packed with families, surprisingly so since it's been out for three weekends.