Box Office Update for 12/16-12/18: King Kong

King Kong ruled the theaters this weekend, but not anywhere near what was being expected. You can visit just about any movie related forum and find discussions on how the movie is a disappointment, or how we have to wait and see if it has legs. All sorts of excuses and theories flying around. I have not really made up my mind on the matter. It really is too early to tell. Whatever the case may be, I think it is an excellent movie that all of you should make a point of seeing. It came in with $50 million for the weekend and $66 million for its first 5 days. This is after the studio was estimating a $110 million opening, well I guess they were wrong!

The only other major release this week was the holiday comedy The Family Stone. It came in at number 3 with $12.5 million. I saw it, and it turned out to be better than I expected, but I still suspect that it will drop pretty quick.

Coming in between them is last weeks number 1, The Chronicles of Narnia. It dropped a little over 51% of it's initial take, and still brought in over $30 million. This was a good movie, and one that actually deserves to be a hit. It will be interesting to see how it fares in upcoming weeks. On the other fantasy front, it looks as if Harry Potter is starting to cool off. Its take is tapering off, and I predict it topping out around $280 million.

One last bit of top ten news, and a pretty big one at that, is the performance of Brokeback Mountain. It cracked the top ten, coming in at number 8, and it did so in spectacular fashion. It had a per screen average of over $35,000, on 69 screens, outperforming all other comers, and also giving us the best average of any top ten film this year. If this number is indicative of what it will do when its release widens, this could be huge.

Well, that's all I have! Any thoughts on this week's top films?

This Week	Last Week	Title	Wknd Gross	Overall	Week in release
1	N	King Kong	$50,130,145	$66,181,645	1
2	1	The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe	$31,837,683	$113,169,644	2
3	N	The Family Stone	$12,521,027	$12,521,027	1
4	3	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	$5,952,452	$252,598,259	5
5	2	Syriana	$5,605,167	$22,462,362	4
6	4	Walk the Line	$3,688,031	$82,607,528	5
7	5	Yours, Mine, and Ours	$3,511,110	$45,202,963	4
8	15	Brokeback Mountain	$2,508,494	$3,474,311	5
9	7	Just Friends	$2,080,852	$29,572,142	4
10	6	Aeon Flux	$1,751,220	$23,215,672	3