Variety has an article up now on “quiet noisemakers” — films like The Constant Gardener, Broken Flowers, Pride & Prejudice and others that have done a lot more business overseas than they have in North America. The article also includes this interesting paragraph:
Only a few major releases managed the same sort of long-lasting run. Warner’s “Batman Begins,” New Line’s “Wedding Crashers,” U’s “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” Sony’s “Are We There Yet?,” Disney’s “Herbie: Fully Loaded” and its “Sky High” were the only pics among the year’s top 40 that managed to see their final domestic take more than quadruple the opening weekends.
So these are the films that had “legs” — these are the films that had good word of mouth, or good repeat business, and do not owe their success entirely to the opening weekend and the pre-release marketing that led up to it. There are only two films on this list that I didn’t particularly care for, but then again, there’s only one or two that I thought were particularly good, too. That’s kind of sobering, actually.
UPDATE: Hmmm, now that I’ve checked BoxOfficeMojo.com‘s list of the year’s top-grossing films, I think we should add Madagascar and Hitch to the list of films that quadrupled their opening weekends. Walk the Line could be joining the club very soon, too. And then there’s March of the Penguins, but that film is covered elsewhere in the Variety article, and it was not a “major release” — at least not at first.
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