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Spider-Man 3 Plummets in Second Weekend


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It's good news/bad news for the presumed winner of this summers box office arms race. According to Variety, the pic has brought in $622 million worldwide, which means they have official made $53 million in profit.

No, that's not a typo. The film cost $258 million to make, and theaters take half of all box office proceeds (though on a sliding scale.) You can take the worldwide gross and cut that sucker right in half to figure out how much goes back to the studio, which would be $311 million. Subtract 258 from 311 and you get a $53 million dollar profit after making over half a billion in ticket sales.

That's actually the good news. The bad news is that the films mediocre quality reputation has spread like wildfire, and absolutely crushed the second weekends take. SM3 is down 60% from its opening which luckily happened happened after they've made back their costs.

You see, this is the danger of not putting proper constraints on directors. It doesn't matter how talented they are, or how successful they've been in the past, it's all about what can they do for you today? Well, here's a hint: if you let them spend $250 million to make a movie, that movie will have to gross half a billion just to break even.

Consider Saw and Saw 2. These films only cost $5.2 million to produce combined, but brought in $250 million. Was it an "event" of epic proportions? Was it iconic? Was it celebrated and breathed on and drooled over and exulted?

Neither of these films were any of these things, and yet they've made a larger profit (so far) for than Spider-Man 3 has.

FilmCostGrossProfit
Spider-Man 3$258m$622m$53m
Saw 1&2$5.2m$250m$119m
Saw 1&2&3$15.2m$414m$207m


Think about that.

*

  • Delta Farce stunk it up with just $3.5m for the weekend.
  • Georgia Rule brought in $5.8m, which ought to just about pay for Lindsay Lohan's alcohol bill on the set.
  • 28 Weeks Later made $10m. Everything is getting crushed this weekend under Stink-Man 3.
  • J.K. Rowling is incapable of breaking out of the box (Potter 8.) Most talented female writer ever? More like biggest franchise hack in history.
  • Nick Cage will take over the role of Al Capone from Robert DeNiro for another installment of The Untouchables.
  • Actor Edward James Olmos said Battlestar Galactica will go off the air after the fourth season, and he said it definitively. However, EP David Eick says otherwise.
  • The race to avoid having to make original films heats up with attempts to make a third Tomb Raider.
  • The new Bionic Woman is a hottie, but will the series sizzle or stink? Check out a picture gallery here.
  • I have an item in my RSS feed reader from the Ausiello Report stating that "Sources confirm that NBC has greenlit Law & Order for an 18th season. Developing..." at 12:27pm, but that item isn't on the website or in the RSS feed anymore. Interesting..
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The text of this article is Copyright © 2006,2007 Paul William Tenny. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Attribution by: full name and original URL. Comments are copyrighted by their authors and are not subject to the Creative Commons license of the article itself.