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2009-08-20

Wednesday Box Office Report

Box Office Mojo has updated the numbers for Wednesday....and Ponyo had a great day! Yaayy!

Here are Ponyo's numbers for Wednesday:

Daily 8/19: $521,182
Screens: 927
Per-Screen: $562
Total: $5,233,143

In the daily earnings, Ponyo was once again in 9th place. Nobody has moved at all since Friday. However, if we look at the per-screen average, here's what we see:

1 - District 9 - $1,268
2 - Julie and Julia - $736
3 - The Time Traveller's Wife - $688
4 - Ponyo - $562
5 - G.I. Joe - $545

Yaay!! We moved up one space to number four! And G.I. Joe got beat? Wednesday was a very good day.

I really don't have much to say about the numbers today. I think Ponyo is an excellent movie...people should go and see it...people are not going to see it...people would rather watch '80s toys blow things up...and the culture gets just a little more stupid.

Some of you have offered a more optimistic take on Ponyo's performance, anticipating a long, slow burn. I surely hope so, and perhaps the movie's low profile will work in its favor. In an ideal world, this would be a case of a movie gradually finding its audience. But we don't live in that world; we live in a world where attention spans are practically nil, and last week's movie might as well be last year.

With week 1 complete, Ponyo has earned $5.2 million. What do you think? Did that match your expectations? What are your weekend predictions? Chat away, everybody.

4 comments:

Alex said...

Coming from Hollywood, that looks like a weird release platform to me. 1k screens on week one is neither a huge endorsement nor a test platform to build on via word of mouth. You'd expect it to start on half as many screens and have a per/screen of 1k$+. I wouldn't be surprised if 5m is a little frustrating to the distributor, especially if they took all the time to make that ridiculous song for Disney Channel marketing.

アレックス* said...

"last week's movie might as well be last year"

That's what I meant to comment on. I don't think Hwd agrees with you, especially lately. The style with small films and foreign films has been to release very slowly on a small number of screens and build on that if the per/screen is promising. This is what got Juno into multiplexes in the Bible Belt, etc. (check the BOM for that film if you're interested in what a contemporary platform release strategy looks like).

I mean to say that it isn't too hard to get the feeling that Ponyo might have been loved so dearly by its distributor that they over-opened it a bit. It's not doing bad business, though. But it's just a little interesting that they took this route.

Daniel Thomas MacInnes said...

Compelling insights, as always. I find that I'm very much the student on these matters, so I'm glad that everybody is able to offer explanations. I'm looking forward to seeing how Ponyo performs this weekend, and I'm far more hopeful than I was back on Monday.

アレックス* said...

Yeah, it's still a weird situation with Ghibli in America. In terms of what you might crudely call the 'Japanese Brand', you can't exactly market Ghibli as "elite" (like Murakami, etc) because they're cartoons; but they don't quite fit with the mass-market animations either (see: Pokemon, etc). Always interesting to see how they play out.

BTW, I just found this blog and I think it's really great. Awesome reviews, etc. Really good work!

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