The Reject Report Update: A Big Weekend for Ratatouille and Bruce Willis

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 2, 2007

Bonjour, amigos, and bon appetit! (I know already, “amigos” is Spanish.) Welcome to our Monday box office recap at the Reject Report. As predicted, the story of the weekend was— Remy the Rat.

Ratatouille was first, though it was not the blockbuster that people at Pixar might have hoped for. Live Free or Die Hard finished second, taking in roughly $33 mil for the weekend and roughly 47 mil over five days— which is about the same as the $47 mil over three days earned by the funky rat from France.

Overall, the big winner this weekend has to be Bruce Willis. His action movie exceeded expectations, while Remy the Rat missed expectations. In fact it’s the second week in a row where the performance of the Number One movie in the land ended up being kind of underwhelming.

Last week’s Number One Evan Almighty drowned at the box office again. Something like a 50% drop, which means it definitely isn’t going to make its money back. But then again, we told you that last week. Not even all those born-again Christians are able to save this movie, even though they were the target audience. Then again, they probably heard how God-awful this movie was and stayed home, too. What can I say? This is two hundred million dollars down the tubes at Universal, a big expensive flop.

1408 ended up doing pretty good business this weekend, almost $11 mil, after dropping like a rock all week long. So those weekend crowds really saved them. All the usual suspects made up most of the Top Ten. Michael Moore’s Sicko finshed in ninth spot ahead of Evening, despite a lower theater count. Sicko made $4.5 mil.

The weekend box office totals, from Box Office Mojo:

As for how I fared with my own predictions this week, the less said the better. I got the order of finish at the top about right, but I overestimated the gate for Ratatouille and Sicko, and underestimated Live Free or Die Hard, Evan Almighty and 1408, among others. Based on my own ineptitude, then, why should I even bother making predictions as to how Transformers will do?

It’s yet another movie with a midweek release. In fact, it’s opening early, on Monday, in a few cities. And it actually goes wide Tuesday, one day ahead of their heavily-promoted July 4th “official” release date.

My fearless prediction: Number One. A take of at least hundred million dollars in the USA by next Monday. Now you watch, this movie will probably under-perform and make me look bad, again.

Very few movies make it to a hundred million, even for five days. These days sixty million is considered really good. It also seems as if these Number One movies are underperforming in terms of box office lately. So I don’t know if my hundred million prediction will come true. However, on the positive side the buzz is through the roof, and the trailers look incredible with all these robots. Michael Bay is known for hits and is due for a big one after what went down with The Island. Rotten Tomatoes has Transformers at 82% right now. So all the elements are there for this movie to be Number One, no question about it. The only real question is by how much. I also read that a few theater chains are planning multiple 24-hour showings of this movie in the next few days. I wouldn’t be surprised. Transformers is going to be the big story of this coming week.

Happy holidays to people in Canada and the USA! The Reject Report will be back on Friday with early news, hopefully, on how Transformers is doing at theaters across America.

| | Read more articles by John Cairns