CHUD’S BOX OFFICE WRAP UP 5/30/11

***These are all the four-day holiday totals. CHUD predictions for Hangover and Panda based on 4-day + Thursday openings.

Avg. CHUD Prediction Difference: +/- $11.1m (fucking outlier Panda)

There’s nothing better than a Monday off- not only is it an extra day making your weekend longer, it also cuts the following week short. So much better than, say, a Friday off.

Motherfuckers be seein’ movies this weekend! Many broken records, dollars made, hot dogs cooked, and service members honored later, we’ve got a financial web of gross grosses to untangle, so let’s break it down legit-like…

Actually before we begin, in reference to that “service members honored”, I want to give thanks for my cousin Christopher, who endured a pretty terrible on-base tragedy after a tour of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was left comatose with little hope of survival, much less fully functioning brain activity, but I’m happy to report that only a few months later he is alive, awake, and Facebooking like a fiend. That’s a big ole dollop of perspective (for me at least) on this Memorial Day.

But we’re here to talk about movies, so lets do it.

• The Hangover II – Fuck a second weekend drop, or crappy legs, Hangover II has done what it came to do. Opening with the biggest live-action comedy opening ever, along with the 2nd highest R-rated opening ever, The Hangover spread out its opening across five days, and still managed to have the third best 3-day of the year. The international showing was just as strong, relative to the first film, and all-in the film is worth just under 200m in five days. While the consensus among the critical community and more discerning audiences seems to be that the film is a shameless retread, the audience scores are all high, and money fucking talks. If I may be forgiven for dragging some anecdotal evidence into this, take a look at the Hangover II Reaction video we shot for GUY.com. I didn’t have to do any clever editing to create the very… visible juxtaposition of reactions that you’ll see.

One might expect this to be pretty front-loaded, and that may well be the case, but with such a huge front-load the dropoff would have to be pretty staggering not to take it farther than the original. That means a worldwide total of half-a-billion or more, by the way. We’ll see how it fares next frame before guessing with too much certainty about it’s full-run possibilities. Regardless, Warner Brothers is popping the champagne and calling in the lady-boys for real this week.

• Kung Fu Panda 2 – Sad panda is sad, and throwing off a gentleman’s prediction curve. The Panda story is a complex one, but I think it’s a mistake to spin it too far in the negative direction. It’s easy to compare the $68m domestic five-day to the original’s $60m three-day that didn’t have the benefit of 3D ticket prices, but it’s been a thick year of animation, there’s still a fresh, huge family property to compete with, and The Hangover is the kind of cultural phenomenon that bled all of the marginal audiences that might have otherwise gone with Panda (date nights couples, for example). The real story is the huge batch of international records that Panda broke, which includes a Chinese record for the biggest foreign film debut ever. Across the five day there was also the subtle signs that Panda will hold on longer than any other film currently breaking records- it’s going to do well. We’ve mentioned before that the international numbers are becoming a more necessary part of this conversation, and since the first Panda did $416m of it $631m overseas, I think the same will be true for the sequel.

• Pirates 4 – Depending on how you shake out the holiday numbers, Pirates did a little above or a little below 50%. Either way, that’s not catastrophic under any circumstances, and not bad in a weekend with two films so directly targeting both ends of its audiences. It’s still making the bank across the world, even if it’s not shaking down the doors domestically. $634 million dollars worldwide. In two weekends. This whole global industry thing is pretty sweet, no? This is probably how Disney hoped Tron would act, as it’s the mark of a true, lasting franchise that can be included in toys and parks and rides and sequels for years to come. Pirates remains that kind of a franchise, as it will likely shake out with a grand total very near its predecessors.

• Bridesmaids – Even with event films at the raunchy, animated, and Piratey end of the spectrum continuing to crowd the market, Bridesmaids fell little, or not at all (depending again on how you look at the numbers). Either way you slice it, the film is acting like a Knocked Up or a 40-Year-Old Virgin, suggesting there will be lasting cultural cache and imitators a plenty. It’s good, so that’s good.

• On the other end of the spectrum, with Midnight In Paris Woody Allen has his first film in the top 7 in quite some time, with an impressive $45k per theater in 58 locations. Malick also did fairly well, with Tree of Life $122k in 4 theaters. I frankly don’t see either of them platforming particularly far or crossing over, but it’s good to see the audience for these films making their way out to theaters right away. Shit didn’t work out that way for The Beaver. Maybe one or both of these will catch some momentum and carve out a nice place just outside of the top-10 to make some cash.

Phew, a lot of messy record breaking and five-days and four-days and international numbers. There are a few other conversations that sprang from this weekend, including some doom-saying for 3D. Panda showed softly in 3D theaters, with less than half of revenue coming from stereoscopic screens, as opposed to the normal 60%. Is this an indication that 3D is going to continue falling off this year, perhaps even hampering the box office tallies of some films? Does it have more to do with family wallets already being drained from all of the animated films that have come out this year? It’s tough to call (not that that will stop anyone), but we’ve got over a dozen 3D releases left this year- I want to see how Green Lantern and Potter‘s 2D/3D ratios play out before coming to any conclusions.

Next week doesn’t let up as X-Men: First Class brings the first mutant film with an all-new cast, and a new look for a (financially and creatively) ailing series. Wolverine barely doubled its $85m opening (on more screens than any previous X-Men film) with such a toxic word-of-mouth, but by all accounts First Class is a return to form, perhaps the best in the series. Could we see a return to a more long-legged pattern for Matthew Vaughn’s mutant foray?

The thread in which you talk about this stuff.