From Usatoday, "By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest surpassed virtually every box-office debut achievement on record this weekend, capturing the biggest opening in movie history.
The Johnny Depp adventure took in a staggering $132 million in its first three days, according to studio estimates from box-office trackers Nielsen EDI.
The debut easily shatters the record held by 2002's Spider-Man, which opened to $114.8 million.
The milestones didn't stop there. The sequel to the 2003 smash became the first film to rake in $100 million in two days. It did $55.5 million on Friday, the biggest single-day haul for any movie, eclipsing Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which did $50 million in one day last year.
"They're mind-blowing numbers," says Chuck Viane, distribution chief for Disney, which released Pirates. "We knew it would be a big movie, but I don't think anyone knew it was going to be part of a pirate-chic phenomenon. That's what really helped make it huge."
The film arrived riding a crest of pirate mania. Retailers are selling everything from T-shirts to dinner plates emblazoned with skulls and crossbones. Disneyland's theme park ride reopened Monday with 4,500 people waiting 31/2 hours in line to see the new animatronic versions of Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush's pirate Barbossa.
"It's still a relatively new film franchise, but Jack Sparrow is already an icon for a young generation," says Chad Hartigan, a box-office analyst for Reelsource. "He has an appeal we haven't seen in the movies for some time."
Depp initially mortified Disney executives with his decision to play Sparrow as a loopy, smirking and sometimes effeminate pirate.
But after the first film sailed to $305 million, those executives asked him to ham it up even more for this movie and the third installment, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, due May 25.
"You have to give all the credit in the world to Johnny," Viane says. "He's created a character people want to dress like, be like. They can't get enough of him."
Even competing studios had to tip their hats to the film, which helped drive ticket sales for the top 12 movies 50% over the same weekend last year.
"Kudos to Disney," says Rory Bruer, distribution chief for Sony Pictures, which released Spider-Man. "This is the kind of thing that gets people excited about going to the movies."
Superman Returns dropped a sizable 58% for second place and $21.9 million; The Devil Wears Prada was third with $15.6 million, down 43%. Click was fourth with $12 million, and Cars crossed the $200 million mark with $10.3 million. Final figures are due Monday."
6 comments:
Ha! That's great. I certainly saw more crowds on Friday night (as I was passing by, doing something else) than I saw for Superman. Of course, I saw Supes on the Tuesday night screening so that might not be too fair a comparison.
Anyhoo, I'd say Pirates fell a teensy bit short of the mark I was hoping for, but I had a really good time and I suspect I'll be back for more.
I'm actually very surprised that this outsold Superman, let alone every opening weekend movie ever. I guess I'll have to accept the fact that I'll never be able to predict what this country is going to embrace and what it will snub.
Octo, have you seen or are going to see that Scanner Darkly movie? Have you seen Waking Life? Do you accept rotoscoping as legitimate art or do you think it's cheating?
Now they're going to wilfully ignore logic and pretend that Orlando Bloom is a big box office draw (as they did after Fellowship of the Ring).
Yeah, it's interesting how that works. Right-place-right-time-guy will reap the benefits and the public will follow suit and just accept him as a superstar. Who are we supposed to get angry at again?
Yeah, Bloom's sure to pull some more marketability out of this, but his personal arc seems to head inexorably towards irrelevance.
I'm seeing A Scanner Darkly tomorrow night, actually. I think rotoscoping is legit in principle but overuse can lead to cheating in no time. See Ralph fucking Bakshi for examples 1 through 20. He's a cheater; he even shows the same footage twice.
At first I thought Waking Life was like a colored-in Slacker, but by about halfway through I thought it was brilliant. That was the first year the Oscars offered a Best Animated Feature award and I was appalled it didn't even get nominated -- I don't think you could've asked for a more innovative application of animation to evoke mood and ideas.
Maybe it didn't qualify for technical reasons, I don't know. But I really liked it.
I don't know what to say about animation directors who can't draw. The "cheating" debate is interesting but the style of roto used here is way more sophisticated and therefore aesthetically problemmatic than the Bakshi style.
One of the "Scanner" animators was talking about the difficulty of animating Robert Downey because of the sheer quantity of little moves on his face, which goes back to a contentious debate octo and I had about whether animation (nay kind) could convey the emotional depth of live action. This is obviously a tricky topic but it's relevant here since the purpose of the "Scanner" technique is to not throw away the money you paid to the actors because their performances are in the movie, which means that the drawings have to convey vastly more geometrical data than in ordinary cell animation or Pixar stuff in which a basically-motionless Woody blinks in sadness and our brains fill in the rest of his identity.
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