DISNEY - CARS PICKS UP SPEED

The folks at Disney who are assigned the job of estimating what the studio's movies will do on Sundays are having a difficult time doing so with Cars. (Weekend estimates are based on actual ticket sales for Friday and Saturday and an educated guess for Sunday.) Last week they overestimated Sunday's results by nearly $3 million. This weekend they underestimated the results by almost the same amount. As it turned out, Cars wound up with $33.7 million (instead of $31.2 million), making the drop from last weekend 43.9 percent. The film has now earned $117.1 million in ten days. Paramount's Nacho Libre came in second with $28.3 million, but its per-theater average actually beat that of Cars -- $9,221 versus $8,458 for the cartoon. Universal's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift finished in third place with $24 million, while Warner's The Lake House debuted in fourth place with $13.6 million.

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date):
1. Cars, Disney, $33,731,634, 2 Wks. ($117,055,283); 2. Nacho Libre, Paramount, $28,309,599, (New); 3. The Fast and the Furious, Universal, $23,973,840, (New); 4. The Lake House, Warner Bros. $13,616,196, (New); 5. The Break-Up, Universal, $9,831,145, 3 Wks. ($92,260,160); 6. X-Men: The Last Stand, 20th Century Fox, $7,820,253, 4 Wks. ($216,218,853); 7. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, 20th Century Fox, $7,288,977, (New); 8. The Omen, 20th Century Fox, $5,640,849, 2 Wks. ($47,188,054); 9. The Da Vinci Code, Sony, $5,266,560, 5 Wks. ($198,767,811); 10. Over the Hedge, DreamWorks, $4,339,015, 5 Wks. ($139,047,483).

20/06/2006