PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - PIRATES SHAKES ITS BOOTY

Box office records became so much cannon fodder for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest over the weekend as the Disney sequel opened to a stunning $132 million. It broke the previous record for a three-day weekend set by Spider-Man in 2002 with $114.8 million. It was even greater than the record for a four-day weekend, set by X-Men: The Last Stand, which garnered $122.9 million over the Memorial Day holiday. Its $55.5-million gross on Friday represented the biggest single-day take in box-office history. The $100.2 million it took in by the end of Saturday represented the biggest two-day gross. (It also became the fastest film ever to cross the $100-million mark.) Its $31,945 per-theater average was the biggest ever for a wide release, even though it played in 4,133 theaters (about 8,500 screens), the fourth-widest release in history. "A franchise like Pirates elevates the entire company," Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook told the Wall Street Journal. The movie also helped the overall box office set a new record -- a total of some $217 million, according to Nielsen EDI -- well above the $188 million set in June 2004, when Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban led the field. With moviegoers hoping to avoid sold-out theaters, online ticket sellers MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com each set records. (Fandango said that on Friday it was selling an average of nearly 10 Pirates tickets per second and that the movie represent over 90 percent of its weekly ticket sales.) In an interview with today's (Monday) Los Angeles Times, Anthony Valencia, an analyst with money manger TCW, said, "This is great news for [Disney] and for the industry. ... The first thing people are going to say when they see these record numbers is, 'Gee, I don't want to be the only person who hasn't seen that movie.'" As for Disney, Valencia said, "This puts the company back where it was for a long time -- at the forefront of family entertainment." (While Pirates was drawing most of the attention, Disney's Cars was quietly crossing the $200-million mark as it dropped just 29 percent to $10.3 million, to bring its total gross to $205.5 million.) As expected, the big loser was Superman Returns -- but it lost more than analysts had anticipated, dropping a whopping 58 percent in its second weekend to wind up with $21.9 million. (Superman Returns dropped as much as 70 percent in some overseas markets where it competed with Pirates.)

The top ten films for the weekend, according to studio estimates compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
1. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, $132 million; 2. Superman Returns, $21.85 million; 3. The Devil Wears Prada, $15.6 million; 4. Click, $12 million; 5. Cars, $10.3 million; 6. Nacho Libre, $3.3 million; 7. The Lake House, $2.8 million; 8. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, $2.5 million; 9. Waist Deep, $1.9 million; 10. The Break-Up, $1.6 million.

10/07/2006