Paramount finds $2 million under a mattress, so Transformers 2 gets its $200 million five-day gross after all.

Well, the final numbers are out, and Transformers 2's three-day take was only $109 million. Yet they are still claiming that the five-day total was $200 million. How say you? Well, since he sums it up so well, I'll just borrow Brandon Gray's exposition from Box Office Mojo.

* Note: Revenge of the Fallen's weekend gross fell $3 million short of Paramount's Sunday estimate, which would have put the five-day opening at $198.2 million. Though shy of $200 million, it would have still ranked second among the all time five-day starts. However, Paramount revised its grosses from Wednesday and Thursday upward, and that's what pushed the total past $200 million. Wednesday went from $60.6 million to $62.0 million, and Thursday went from $28.6 million to $29.1 million. Paramount reported that the differences came from unreported showings from the movie's midnight openings on Wednesday night, which went from the previously reported $16 million at around 3,000 theaters to $16.8 million at close to 3,300 theaters, as well as late reports from institutional IMAX locations and theaters in Puerto Rico and some Caribbean islands (which the studio counts in its domestic numbers), which accounted for $1.1 million of the difference.

Uh... right. I'm sure that's EXACTLY what happened. I'm sure there's um, 'more than meets the eye' to this would-be box office correction.

Scott Mendelson