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Box office palooza, weekend update: quiet end to 2Q10, fireworks to come
Toy Story 3 takes a victory lap. Box office for the top 12 movies this weekend, the last of 2Q10, totaled $156.8M, down 18.7% from a year-ago period that featured the opening of Transformers 2, according to preliminary data from boxofficemojo.com. The weekend was a tad ($8M) above our model, mainly due to better-than-expected openings by Grown Ups and Knight and Day.
Weekend rundown. Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3 ranked first with $59M in its second weekend, $0.8M below our estimate. Sony’s Grown Ups, starring Adam Sandler, finished second with $41.0M, beating our estimate by $7.6M. Fox’s Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, was third with $20.5M, $4.9M above our estimate.
July 4 outlook. July 4 falls on Sunday next week with the holiday observed on Monday. Last year July 4 fell on Sat. and was observed on Fri. This is a somewhat favorable shift as fireworks weigh on movie attendance and Sat. is a bigger movie night than Sun. For the three-day weekend we forecast 18% y/y growth in box office for the top 12 films and for the four-day period we see 24% growth to $226.7M. Over the four-day weekend we see Summit’s Twilight: Eclipse taking the top spot with $85.0M, with a Wed. release taking its opening five-day total to $167.0M. We see Toy Story 3 second with $42.2M in its third weekend, followed by Paramount/ M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, with $33.4M in its opening weekend. Last year’s top movie, Transformers 2, made $42.3M in its second weekend.
Industry box office view. Movies last weekend held better than we had expected, generating $25M more box office for the week than we had modeled based on weekend results. Meanwhile, upside from this weekend leads to a hike to our box office estimate for this week. The net is a $40M, or 1.4%, increase to our 2Q10 box office estimate to a decline of 4.3%, now slightly better than the industry assumptions underlying our below-consensus 2Q10 estimates for HOLD-rated theater stocks Cinemark and Regal. For the third quarter, we currently estimate box office up 5.5% y/y.
Peer inside for more 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.
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By Barton Crockett on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 @ 05:06 PM
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