Up easily made it to first place by about $44 million. Pixar’s tenth movie pulled in $68,108,790, about $7 million more than my prediction. Up also set the new standard for 3D openings, with just over $35 million coming from the extra-dimensional showings. It followed the recent weekly record-breaking trend and took the biggest 3D opening crown from 10-week old Monsters vs Aliens. I’m not exactly a slavish fan of everything Pixar does, but it’s heartwarming to see that the they’ve become so successful without always packing their movies full of quasi-celebrities and pop culture crap.

Even though Drag Me to Hell promised R-rated thrills to a PG-13 audience and had no competition in the horror genre, it only managed $15,825,480, well below my $23 million guess. It had extremely favorable reviews, an unmolested target audience, and a director whose last three movies have totaled nearly 2.5 billion worldwide, but for some reason it just couldn’t find much of an audience. It did okay, averaging $6,310 per theater, but it should have done better. Accounting for inflation, Drag Me to Hell didn’t even out-gross Raimi’s last pre-Spider-Man wide release, For Love of the Game, and barely made more than the 19-year old Darkman, which was in 800 fewer theaters.

Star Trek was the only previously released wide release to fall less than 45% from last week, dubiously making the cut at 44.9%. Terminator Salvation made just $16 million in it’s second weekend, for a $91 million total. It’s going to fall far short of it’s $200 million budget. Even though Angels & Demons isn’t exactly taking US audiences by storm, it’s kicking extreme amounts of ass in foreign markets ($105 million US, $252 million foreign).

The turd of the week was Battle for Terra, making $193 this weekend. That’s a 96% drop from last week. It made about $16 per theater per day. Does that even cover the power used to run the projector?

My history delving into movie numbers only goes back to last September, so I don’t have a long history of knowledge to draw from, but it seems to me that even since just last year, there’s been a noticeable increase in the importance of a movie having a big opening weekend. Sure, having a big opening weekend should always be the goal of a movie, but it takes several weeks for most movies to get near breaking even, that’s generally not even close after one weekend. It follows that of course the first weekend is important, but maximizing the box office of the entire theatrical run should be paramount.

But that isn’t the reality. In practice, as time has gone on, the opening weekend has become the sole focal point and anything after is icing on the cake. The picture in this post isn’t just a nice graphic to visually convey the topic, it’s actually the graph of the weekend totals for Watchmen.

The Holiday (Fall-ish) and Summer movie seasons are when the moneymaking movies are generally released, so we’ll look at those two periods over the years. For the Holiday season, during the 1980′s, the average decline from the first weekend to the second weekend was around 15.7%. In the 1990′s, that average increased to 24.1%. So far in the 2000′s, the average second weekend drop has increased to 31.2%. For the Summer season, the average decline has increased from 30.3% to 38.6% to 48.8%.

So what does that mean? Movies now are getting a higher percentage of their total gross from the opening weekend. They’re building up the hype to give them a big opening and hope some of it spills over into the next few weeks.

Looking at it another way, the percentage of a movie’s box office that comes from the opening weekend has increased over the years. In the 80′s it was 15.7%, 90′s was 21.5%, and the 2000′s is 33.1%. Nowadays a movie’s opening weekend represents twice as much of it’s box office as it did during the 80′s.

Out of the 100 biggest second weekend drops since 1982, three were from the 80′s, 35 from the 90′s, and 62 from the 2000′s.

Of the movies that have debuted in over 3,000 theaters since 1982, the one that has experienced the biggest drop in the second weekend was this year’s Friday the 13th, which dropped 80.4%. X-Men Origins: Wolverine comes in with the sixth biggest drop (69%) and Watchmen the tenth (67.7%). That’s three of the top ten movies that have seen the biggest second weekend drop, all from 2009. The oldest movie in the top 10 is Hulk from 2003. The oldest movie on the list of 58 was Pokeman from 1999.

Let’s take a look at Angels & Demons. It made $46 million it’s first weekend. Based on the averages, it might make around $24 million this weekend and $138 million overall. Using the 1980′s average (with an average 80′s ticket price of $3.41), a movie like A&D would have opened to $22 million, had a second weekend of $15 million, and a total of $140 million. The overall total is nearly identical, but the 80′s opening was less than half the 2009 opening.

There is even a trend developing where movies are relying more heavily on their opening day. The list of movie whose opening Friday represented the biggest percentage of their opening weekend is topped by Hannah Montana the Movie, only a month old. 53.9% of Hannah’s opening weekend came from Friday. Twilight is number two at 51.7%. Think about it: the two movies in the history of movies that have had their opening day represent the biggest portion of their opening weekend were released in the last six months. Four of the top five were released in the last seven months. 20 of the top 100 were released in the past year.

There have been more than 600 movies released into theaters each year since 2006. There aren’t enough screens to go around for everyone to have a nice long run, so studios gear everything toward the opening weekend and hope for the best. With so much resting on that one weekend, if it isn’t big, all hope is lost for the film being financially viable in the near future. Take a movie like Watchmen, with a $150 million budget and a $55 million opening weekend it looked good, but it cut it’s losses after 11 weeks and $107 at the box office, averaging $5.2 million per week after it’s first weekend. Those first three days of a movie’s release have become the most important in the entertainment industry.

Angels & Demons managed to hold off Star Trek and claim first place, pulling in $46,204,168. My prediction was only about $18 million high, but I’m not upset- it’s always good to get knocked down a peg after a string of successes. It was a little hard to know exactly what A&D was going to do because 1) The Da Vinci Code had a huge opening weekend and 2) it was the first big non-scifi movie in a couple weeks. Both of those factors made me think it could be a big weekend, but a lack of buzz and controversy hinted at an average weekend. Before I had adjusted my prediction, the calculated total was $42,741,461. Sometimes it’s best to have faith in the math.

Not being able to crack $50 million had to be a bit of a disappointment for Sony Pictures, but the movie also made $102 million overseas this weekend, for a grand total of $148 million, a hair short of the production budget. So even if the domestic totals disappoint, the movie is still going to make a lot of money.

Star Trek and it’s good word of mouth led to a $43 million weekend. That’s a drop of just 43% from last week, the smallest second week drop for a movie debuting at number one since Knowing back on March 27th. With a 10-day total of $147,645,384, Star Trek also has  the distinction of being the highest-grossing movie in the Star Trek pantheon, spanking Star Trek IV’s $109 million total.

Despite having a DVD release last Tuesday, Taken still managed almost $240,000 in theaters this weekend. It’s not a lot, but it works out to a per-theater average of $960 dollars, which is very respectable for a movie released all the way back on Super Bowl Weekend.

Monster vs Aliens had a fantastic weekend, dropping just over 2% from last week, actually averaging more per theater. Battle for Terra can seemingly do little right, managing to drop 79% this weekend for a $36,488 take. At least they can say it did better than Delgo.

A week after X-Men Origins: Wolverine saw the biggest opening of 2009, Star Trek sidles right up behind it in second place. It hauled in $75,204,289 for the weekend, my prediction off a minuscule $5 million, easily becoming the biggest opening in the franchise and will probably become the overall highest-grossing next weekend. But what does that really mean? It’s not like this Star Trek has a lot to do with anything that has come before. If it weren’t for the names of people, places, and things, you could probably get away with calling this movie a lot of things other than Star Trek without anyone noticing. That’s my problem with this tidal wave of remakes: the movies themselves aren’t much to sneeze at. They’re doing little more than capitalizing on a name to draw an audience. I wonder what would happen if some of these movies were released with different titles. Would Last House on the Left be noted for it’s originality? Would Star Trek have kicked off it’s own string of sequels? But thinking on that is probably as futile as trying to count how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Star Trek as we know it is dead. Long live Star Trek.

Next Day Air, the other new release (in case you forgot), was most likely the recipient of people turned away from sold out Star Trek shows. That’s the a reasonable explanation for it’s $4,111,043 take this weekend. My prediction was only off $300,000 on this bad boy. I guess it didn’t do so bad as it had the third highest per theater average in the top 15 movies and finished in sixth place overall.

Wolverine continued the trend of movies with huge opening weekends crashing back to Earth like a five year-old off a Halloween sugar high. It made $26.4 million, off 69% from last weekend. That is a rather precipitous drop for a second weekend. I see it translating to a hype-fueled opening weekend followed by a weekend fueled by the people that wanted to see it the opening weekend but didn’t. If people were raving and recommending, I would have expected a smaller drop.

If you thought Wolverine’s 69% was bad, Battle for Terra (released last week, won’t blame you for forgetting) saw the box office fall off 84%. On the flip-side, Watchmen had the biggest gain of the weekend, up 81% from last week. Yeah it only made $112,482, but that percentage looks impressive. Say, that’s kind of like the movie itself: looks impressive, but critical inspection reveals there’s less there than you thought.

And…

Wolverine became the biggest movie of 2009, taking in $85,805,003. It was just $3.75 million short of my prediction- a veritable bullseye. Not only did it dominate every other movie in terms of total box office, but also in per theater average. That big fat number also made it the 19th biggest opening in the history of cinema, only $500,000 behind X2. Obtaining an illegal copy of a movie is wrong, but it’s hard to take all the studio whining seriously when the first real test of the effects of movie piracy didn’t give any evidence that it impacted the gross at all. If the movie had made $40 million, I’d believe the studios’ bitching, but this was one of the biggest opening weekends ever. It’s a hard concept to wrap your head around, but maybe people will pay to see a movie they want to see. Maybe we aren’t all morally corrupt copyright infringers at heart.

Believe it or not, there were a couple other new movies this weekend. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past managed to scrape together $15,411,434, $4.5 million below my prediction. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it was a relatively strong opening considering the competition and another decent opening for a Matthew McConaughey romatical-type movie. Of course, that means production on the next one will commence in short order.

You probably didn’t notice since no one else really seemed to, but Battle for Terra did actually open this weekend. I predicted an admittedly high $2.8 million, but I thought it could get close since there wasn’t a lot of competition for kids at the theater. And really, $2.8 million isn’t exactly a high bar to reach. I guess parents must have been dragging all their kids along to see Wolverine since Terra barely made a million dollars, $1,082,362 to be exact. It wasn’t a huge release, in only 1,162 theaters, but $1 million just sounds so pathetic. Apparently no one on the Internet (at least anywhere I looked) knows what the budget of this thing was, but a lone million has to be a disappointment.

Obsessed, in spite of generally poor reviews, came out big this weekend, to the tune of $28,612,730, $9 million more than my prediction. Now, I’m wondering whether the bigger draw was Beyonce Knowles or the promise of a huge catfight. I’m thinking it may have been a little of both, but I’m leaning toward the latter. If I told you this was the seventh biggest opening in the month of April, you’d probably shrug and soon forget that useless piece of trivia. But when I tell you that due to the $2.10-ish increase in average ticket prices in the last ten years this movie pushed The Matrix down to the eighth biggest opening, I hope you’ll pause to reflect on what a sorry state of affairs your local theater has become. Yeah, you’re paying 41% more than you were ten years ago. And I don’t think anyone’s been putting that extra money to good use.

The deuce goes to Fighting, which skidded to a halt just north of $11 million. I predicted $9 million, so I’ll go ahead and pat myself on the back for getting close. What more is there to say except that audiences are much more interested in seeing chicks fight.

The Soloist was the third widest release and also the third highest grosser. It made $9,716,458, about $1.3 million more than I thought. It averaged $4,801 per theater, better than both Fighting and second place 17 Again. Even though this movie had to start out with award aspirations, my guess is that jettisoning it in April didn’t really make a big difference in the box office receipts. The Reader has an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture under it’s belt and has still only managed $34,157,651. Some of these actor-centric movies only have so much gas in the tank.

As far as my predictions go, I’ll go along with Meatloaf and say two out of three ain’t bad.

To no one’s surprise, 17 Again came out on top this weekend to the tune of $23,722,310. I predicted $26,270,805. $2.5 million- that’s darn near a bullseye for as close as I’ve been lately. People, I should say women, as in 75% of the audience was female, weren’t turned off by the rehashed old man in a kid’s body story. They were actually probably turned on seeing Zac Efron headline his first movie. For real, three-quarters of the audience was female and it didn’t star a bunch of women and wasn’t a romantic comedy. Whatever IT is, that dude has it.

State of Play managed to beat out Hannah Montana and Fast & Furious to end up in second place. It managed $14 million, $500,000 more than my prediction. It was able to get a decent audience thanks to the names in the cast and great reviews. It’ll probably end it’s run around the $50 million mark. I think you’d have to call that a success.

Crank: High Voltage ended the weekend with $6,963,565, only $300,000 more than I predicted. The movie had a budget around $12.5 million, so despite opening $4 million lower than the first Crank, it’s still going to turn a nice profit by the time it’s through. An interesting side note about the movie: it was shot with video cameras available at your local electronics store. Jason Statham is still the king of low-budget actioners.

In other news: Watchmen continues it’s rocket shot onto home video after making less than $200,000 on it’s seventh weekend. If I had told you Taken and Paul Blart: Mall Cop would both make $40 million more than Watchmen, perhaps everyone in the world would have called me an idiot, but now it’s fact (not the me being an idiot part, the other thing). Even the most superhero hating comic book stomper wouldn’t have believed it.

Hannah Montana the Movie got off to a relatively big $17.5 million Friday, but by Sunday had dropped to a scant $4.5 million, a drop so precipitous that it takes the record for the most front-loaded opening weekend away from Twilight. I’m not exactly sure what comment this makes about the world or movies, but having the two most front-loaded movies in history occur this year has to mean something. My take is this illustrates the extent to which Hollywood is going to cater to niche audiences. Hannah Montana, Twilight, and Watchmen all have a fervent fan base, but it mainly falls within a particular, narrow demographic. Once those hardcore fans have seen the movie, there’s no long tail since the movie doesn’t have broad appeal. It has a monster opening weekend then squeaks like a mouse until it’s finally pulled from theaters. Hannah Montana made $32,324,487 for the weekend (about $8 million more than my prediction), but 54% of that was from Friday. My guess is that the movie falls off 60-70% next weekend and becomes a footnote for having a proportionally big opening day.

I predicted about $20 million for Observe and Report. I thought that since I Love You, Man was four weeks old and Adventureland wasn’t received too well, audience would be ready for another stupid comedy. But it wasn’t to be since the movie only brought in $11 million. That probably isn’t all that bad in light of it’s $18 million budget, but certainly the studio expected more, especially since the movie was in the blazing hot mall cop genre.

My nearly $8 million prediction for Dragonball Evolution felt high, but with these surgically marketed genre movies, you never know. It looks like there really aren’t too many Dragonball or Dragon Ball fans that were salivating to see this movie: $4.7 million for the weekend. And it didn’t even make $1 million on Sunday.

I thought The Fast and The Furious was a one-off movie with an idea abused for a couple who-gives-a-shit sequels, an idea- people race cars, oh and they’re criminals- that has been fairly well played out. I mean, they just ripped off Point Break and changed the surfboards to cars. They even went to the trouble to cast Paul Walker, an actor as inexpressive and disinterested as Keanu Reeves. But obviously Fast & Furious hadn’t even had it’s welcome, let alone worn it out. I guess there wasn’t much competition, with Monsters vs. Aliens the only other movie to crack $10 million, but for real, $71 million? In a world where Paul Blart can make over $140 million, no, I guess it’s really not a surprise.

Despite everyone colluding to make you think Adventureland was Superbad part 2, the movie only hauled in $6,253,507, $3 million-ish short of my prediction. Wait. If they were trying to push the movie as Superbad 2 and no one went to see it, maybe things worked out exactly like they should have. Perhaps they ought to have advertised that Adventureland had no connections, Kevin Bacon-y or otherwise, to Superbad. Or maybe they just shouldn’t have relied on namedropping Superbad and casting the chick from Twilight.

For being the movie that was supposed to change the world, blow our minds, and remove the carcinogens from cigarettes, Watchmen really crapped the bed. Five weeks in and it’s already under $1,000 per theater for the weekend. After 10 weeks Taken is still over $1,100, and it didn’t have near the fanfare or budget or fan base that Watchmen did. It would be one thing if Watchmen had a $19 million budget like Friday the 13th, but the budget was $150 million, a number it’s not going to make back during the theatrical run. That’s pretty bad. That’s like killing comic book movies bad. Maybe this Watchmen movie wasn’t so bad after all.

Per Wikipedia, the cost of producing the movie in 3D was $15 million, or 10% of the budget. If a studio is looking at a potential increase in the gross of 20% with a 10% investment, why not try it? You’ve seen the movies where they just blow $100 million on a terrible idea with terrible talent and only make $50 million out of it, so the potential to increase the profits with 3D would seem like a no-brainer. This is all the proof you need that 3D is the wave of the future.

Second place this weekend went to a surprisingly strong The Haunting in Connecticut. It made $23,004,765, more than doubling my $10,135,648 prediction. Horror movies have been kind of up and down lately and this one lucked out by being one of the ups. Despite the poor reviews and news that the “true events” were really a sham, The Haunting really cleaned up, nearly doubling Knowing, which ended up in third place. I couldn’t find a good number for the budget, but I’m sure $23 million goes a long way to making it back.

Finally there was 12 Rounds. It brought in $5,329,240, making my prediction about $1.6 million high. All you need to know comes from the ReelViews review: “12 Rounds is the unholy stepchild of Die Hard with a Vengeance and Speed, starring a man whose lack of range makes Steven Seagal seem nuanced by comparison.” By my calculations, if they had spent the $2 million on 3D, they’d have made an extra million on this thing. I guess sometimes a movie can be so bad that even 3D fanciness can’t help it.