It’s too early to say anything about the films released in August, of course, but the box-office trajectories of the films released between January and July seem pretty clear. So, depending on how you count these things, we can safely say that there are only a few wide releases from that period that have had such strong “legs” that their final box-office totals will be at least four times what they made in their opening weekends:
- The Bucket List ($20 million by the end of its first wide weekend January 11, closed with $93 million)
- The Bank Job ($6 million when it opened March 7, closed with $30 million)
- Journey to the Center of the Earth ($21 million when it opened July 11, still going strong with $84 million so far)
- Mamma Mia! ($27 million when it opened July 18, still going strong with $110 million so far)
In the more debatable or wait-and-see file we have:
- What Happens in Vegas ($20.2 million when it opened May 9, has $80.2 million so far)
- Space Chimps ($7.2 million when it opened July 18, has $26.8 million so far)
- Kit Kittredge: An American Girl ($3.3 million in its first wide weekend July 4, has $17.1 million so far, but it was in limited release for two weekends prior to that, and it went wide on a Wednesday, so it had $5.8 million by the end of its first weekend, and it has not quite tripled that)
And then there are the even more unusual examples of Atonement and There Will Be Blood, which opened in limited release in December and gradually expanded and made about half of their final box-office totals before they went into wide release in January — so their first weekends in wide release do represent a small portion of the total, but the overall momentum of their releases was in a whole other category from these other films.
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