Reject Report: The Simpsons Movie is a massive hit. Woo hoo!!!!
Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 29, 2007
Everyone is smiling in Springfield today. We all knew The Simpsons Movie was going to be Number One and was going to be big at the theaters, yada yada yada. But to the tune of $71 million dollars?! There’s no need for Fox movie executives to move to Alaska in disgrace. All that needs to be said are two simple words: woo hoo!!!
Worldwide, The Simpsons Movie is a Number One hit, doing much better than the $50-60 million that most of the experts and prognosticators were predicting for it. Bart, Homer, President Schwarzenegger and everyone else demolished the competition in Terminator-type fashion, as we see from these numbers courtesy of Box Office Mojo:
| Release | Studio | Estimated Gross |
| The Simpsons Movie | Fox | $71,850,000 |
| I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry | Universal | $19,063,000 |
| Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Warner Bros. | $17,065,000 |
| Hairspray | New Line | $15,550,000 |
| No Reservations | Warner Bros. | $11,755,000 |
| Transformers | Paramount / Dreamworks | $11,524,000 |
| Ratatouille | Buena Vista | $7,234,000 |
| Live Free or Die Hard | Fox | $5,350,000 |
| I Know Who Killed Me | Sony | $3,400,000 |
| Who’s Your Caddy? | MGM / Weinstein | $2,900,000 |
To give you a rough idea about how big a hit this movie is: on Friday, The Simpsons Movie opened at $30 million, which is the 17th all time best opening day in history. Plus, Nikki Finke over at Deadline Hollywood Daily pointed out that this opening was better than what Tranformers got when it opened on July 3. Better than Transformers!!! That’s pretty amazing business.
Also, keep in mind this movie opened to $71 million over three days. By contrast, the latest Harry Potter movie opened at $77 million over FIVE days. That’s a really strong opening performance for The Simpsons Movie.
Internationally, The Simpsons Movie shattered opening day records in Argentina, Australia, Chile and Colombia, and has drawn $171.9 million worldwide.
Of the other new movies, No Reservations got $11.7 mil for a fifth-place showing at the box office, and that Lindsay Lohan stripper-movie I Know Who Killed Me only opened to only $3.4 million— a sure sign, perhaps, that people are sick of Lindsay Lohan. This has to be the other big story of the weekend, the meltdown of Lindsay Lohan both on and off the screen. How is her career going to recover from all the bad press from her recent arrest? Good question. People really are sick of these girls-gone-wild (Paris Hilton, Britney Spears) and the box office is reflecting it.
The other new movie out in theaters, Who’s Your Caddy?, finished tenth at $2.9 million.
That’s all for this week, see you again on Friday as The Reject Report previews the coming weekend at theaters with The Bourne Ultimatum, Underdog, and other movies on their way.
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