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Box office palooza, weekend update: Weak box, Shrek 4 did not hold as hoped
Weak weekend; Shrek 4 didn’t hold as we had hoped. Two major movies, Warner Bros.’ Sex and the City 2 [SATC2] and Disney’s Prince of Persia [PRSIA], opened light, while DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek Forever After [SRHK4] did not hold as well as hoped, resulting in a disappointing Memorial Day weekend for the box office and another reduction to our outlook for the latest sequel in DWA’s most profitable franchise.
Shrek details. Shrek 4 was the top movie for the period, with $55.7M over the four-day holiday. But its $43.4M total over the three-day weekend fell 39% week over week, versus our estimate for a 30% drop. So we’ve cut our lifetime domestic box office outlook for Shrek 4 by $45M to $250M. This assumes 40% drops for the next two weeks and a 57% drop the following week when Toy Story 3 opens.
Light weekend. Four-day holiday receipts were $181.6M, according to preliminary data from boxofficemojo.com, a 15.1% drop from last year’s holiday, which was a week earlier in the theater calendar. Over the three-day weekend, receipts totaled $144.7M, down 10.1% y/y. This was a big miss versus our expectation for 19.5% growth. The culprits, in addition to Shrek, were Sex, which pulled in $25.7M less than we had modeled, and Persia, which missed by $10.7M.
Cut to industry outlook. Fallout from the weak weekend is a 1.8 percentage point cut to our 2Q10 industry box office outlook to a decline of 4.9%. This is well below consensus estimates for theater companies Regal and Cinemark for mid single digit box office growth. Quarter-to-date, box office is down 3.7% to $1,650.4M, accounting for 62.9% of our 2Q10 estimate.
Next weekend outlook. We forecast a 23.7% y/y decline in domestic box office for the top 12 movies next weekend to $122.6M, with Shrek 4 the top movie with $26.6M. Shrek faces what we believe will be minor league competition from Marmaduke [MARMA], a live-action adaptation of the comic strip from Fox, with Owen Wilson voicing the title character. We assume an $18.0M opening for this movie. We see Sex 2 third with $16.9M. Last year’s top movie, The Hangover, made $44.9M in its opening weekend.
Peer inside for more movie palooza. Please look inside this note for bottom-up box office estimates for the year, including predictions of top 20 movies for the year and by quarter, top movies by week, top 10 movies by studio, and our take on the 3-D and animated slates for year.
Tag(s): SATC2, PRSIA, MARMA
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By Barton Crockett on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 @ 04:49 PM
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