I like numbers, and I like trivia. So as of this weekend …
Cars, which already had the lowest opening weekend of any Pixar film since Toy Story 2 (1999) despite opening on more screens than any of them, held onto the #1 spot this weekend but dropped a whopping 48% in its second weekend — not unusual for a big summer movie, but a far bigger drop than the other Pixar movies that have come out so far this decade (The Incredibles, 28.7%; Finding Nemo, 33.7%; Monsters Inc., 27.2%).
Is someone cooking the numbers again? If this weekend‘s estimates are accurate, The Omen‘s grosses dropped 66.6% from last weekend’s grosses. Yes, sixty-six-point-six. Hmmm.
X-Men: The Last Stand has passed X2: X-Men United (2003) to become the top-grossing film in that franchise in North America. It is still a bit behind X2 on the global front, but not by much.
Alas, The Da Vinci Code is now the top-grossing Tom Hanks film of all time, worldwide. As of today, it ranks a mere #70 on the all-time domestic chart, but it is #13 on the all-time overseas chart, and when you put the two figures together it is #22 on the all-time worldwide chart — right ahead of Forrest Gump (1994), Hanks’s previous personal best. The Da Vinci Code also owes 70.7% of its income to the overseas market, a statistic surpassed among the Top 100 films of all time worldwide only by Troy (2004, 73.2%) and The Last Samurai (2003, 75.7%).
FWIW, in contrast, The Passion of the Christ (2004) — which made less money than The Da Vinci Code has made so far — took only 39.4% of its revenue from the overseas market, a statistic beaten in the Top 100 by only Return of the Jedi (1983, 34.9%), Batman (1989, 38.9%), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, 36.9%) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002, 34.5%). And note how one of those films was, like The Passion, an American indie flick the popularity of which caught everybody by surprise, while the other films were all released in the 1980s, when global distribution patterns may have been somewhat different from what they are now.
And lest we forget, Nacho Libre had the second-largest opening weekend of any live-action movie starring Jack Black, after King Kong (2005) — or the third-largest, if you count his cameo in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004).
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