Night at the Museum takes number one spot followed by Terminator, Star Trek keeps trekin!
Weekend Report: ‘Night at the Museum,’ ‘Terminator’ Dominate
by Brandon Gray -- May 24, 2009
In one corner this Memorial Day weekend was the sequel to a blockbuster and first major family comedy event in two months, and, in the other, the latest entry in a faded action franchise, emerging from a six-year dormancy and lacking its most iconic figure. It was clear which picture would gross more, and, while both may ultimately pale compared to their predecessors, they each did about as well as could reasonably be expected.
Night of the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian exhibited an estimated $53.5 million on approximately 7,000 screens at 4,096 sites, while Terminator Salvation delivered an estimated $43 million on around 6,400 screens at 3,530 sites (for a $56.4 million tally including its Thursday opening). Overall weekend business was an estimated $174 million, which was up a tick from the same period last year when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull debuted.
Boasting the top start for a live-action Ben Stiller movie, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian was on par with Stiller's animated Madagascar, which opened on Memorial weekend 2005, adjusted for ticket price inflation, though a bit less than the last family comedy Monsters Vs. Aliens. The first Night at the Museum made $30.4 million on approximately 4,900 screens at 3,685 sites in its first three days, which was huge by the standards of its Christmas berth.
Memorial releases tend to be more front-loaded than Christmas releases, and it's unlikely that Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian will wind up near the first Night's $250.9 million final gross. That wouldn't be disappointing because sequels of this ilk frequently fail to sustain the audience of their predecessors, even when the predecessors are well-liked, from Ghostbusters to Men in Black to the recent Pink Panther redux. In its marketing campaign, Battle of the Smithsonian simply offered more of the same shenanigans as the first Night, adding a few new characters to the mix but without a new hook. It coasted on the audience's good will from the first movie, so retaining most of that audience would be a fine result.
Runs at 160 IMAX sites accounted for an estimated $4.1 million of Battle of the Smithsonian's gross. One of those was the Smithsonian itself, which was the picture's top-grossing venue. Distributor 20th Century Fox's exit polling classified 52 percent of the audience as "non-family" (the other 48 percent being families), and suggested that 55 percent of that crowd was under 25 years old with an even split between the genders.
Following the disappointment of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines six years ago, the ratings fizzle of the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the failure of California "Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger (who only makes a digital cameo in the new movie), Terminator Salvation rose from the ashes with a solid debut. Distributor Warner Bros.' research indicated that 63 percent of Salvation's audience was male and 58 percent was in the 18-34-year-old range, and attendance was lower than Terminator 3 (T3) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (T2). T3's first weekend was $44 million at 3,504 locations, which would adjust to around $53 million today, while T2's $31.8 million weekend at 2,274 locations back in 1991 is the equivalent of over $54 million today, and each had greater four-day attendance tallies than Salvation. Though initial numbers were similar, T3 didn't have the market impact of T2, and quickly faded to a $150.4 million final gross.
In the context of the Terminator franchise, Terminator Salvation is as much a prequel as it is a sequel, because the future is treated as the past in the previous movies (and inevitable in T3). Not only that, Salvation is set before the future/past the audience was told about. Coming off as fan boy fantasias more than story advancers, prequels can struggle to appeal beyond the franchise bases. That's why Salvation seemed destined to be commercially more akin to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which also hit a series low) than the rebooted Star Trek. However, the previous Terminators' dramatic flashes of the post-apocalyptic future captured viewers' imaginations to a degree that further exploration was welcome enough (even if artistically unnecessary) to retain more of the audience than a T3 retread might have. Credit must also go to Salvation's slick advertisements that promised a grand action drama.
Down 49 percent, Star Trek notched an estimated $22 million, docking in third place in its third weekend, and jumped ahead of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to become the Star Trek franchise's fourth most-attended picture with a $183.6 million total. Its descent was partly due to a loss of IMAX showings: the Night at the Museum sequel took over nearly all of them. Playing only midnight shows at 130 sites, Star Trek's IMAX-only weekend was an estimated $500,000, off over 90 percent from last weekend for an IMAX-only tally of $20.6 million.
Angels & Demons held slightly better than The Da Vinci Code, which also had the Memorial Day timeframe for its second weekend. Down 54 percent, the thriller sequel collected an estimated $21.4 million for $81.5 million in ten days, though Da Vinci nabbed $136.5 million through the same point. As with Da Vinci, foreign box office was the main story here, accounting for over 70 percent of the worldwide gross. While ranking fourth domestically, Angels & Demons was again the weekend's top movie on the foreign front with an estimated $60.4 million, followed by the Night at the Museum sequel (an estimated $50.1 million in 93 markets). Angels' worldwide tally is $280 million, though Da Vinci reached $454 million in the same amount of time.
While franchise recycling proliferated on Memorial weekend, moviegoers showed modest interest in the latest haphazard, Frankenstein's monster approach to spoofing. With an estimated $11.1 million on around 2,600 screens at 2,450 venues, Dance Flick had a lower-grossing opening than any of the movies it mocked, but it nearly doubled the start of the last spoof of its kind, Disaster Movie, thanks to greater thematic focus. Part of the problem was that the main movie it spoofed, Save the Last Dance, was eight years old, not to mention that the dance sub-genre has not produced a blockbuster in decades: generally-speaking, the more popular the target, the more popular the spoof
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