Christmas Box Office: Les Miserables and Django Unchained blast off, but how frontloaded will they be?

The box office for Christmas day is huge (Les Miserables $18 million, Django Unchained $15 million, The Hobbit $11 million), but the best day may be behind them. The last time Christmas fell on a Tuesday, the major releases (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Sweeney Todd) opened the Friday before while leaving Christmas day for relative lightweights like Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem and The Great Debaters. I don't recall any recent times when a major film opened on Christmas Day which was a Tuesday (when Christmas fell on a Tuesday in 2007, nothing opened that day) since the severely front-loaded Ali back in 2001.  Looking over those two respective weekends, the pattern is clear.  Even with six days to play with, all three of the above films saw massive front-loading, doing anywhere between 38% (Alien v. Predator 2) and 28% (Ali and The Great Debaters) of their business on Christmas day.  So for the respective debuts of Les Miserables, Django Unchained, and Parental Guidance (which earned $6.5 million), the bad news is that it's probable that none of these films will make more than 3.5x their Christmas number by Sunday, to the extent that it's "bad news".  The outlier among Tuesday Christmas openings is the Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman rom-com Kate and Leopold, which did 6.8x its $2.5 million Christmas debut by the 30th of December for a $17 million long weekend (it did 15% on Christmas day).  A relative lightweight like Parental Guidance is likely to benefit more than the far-more anticipated (read - front-loaded)  major openers.  So doing the math, Les Miserables and Django Unchained is looking at a six-day opening of $48 million-$63 million and $41 million and $53 million.  Parental Guidance is much harder to peg and could land somewhere between $20 million and $40 million, with obviously a lot of wiggle room in between.

Scott Mendelson

Amazing Spider-Man sets Tuesday record with $35 million opening day. Six day weekend: $140m-$162m.

The Amazing Spider-Man ended up almost as amazing as Spider-Man 2 on the first day of its respective six-day Independence Day holiday weekend.  With $35 million per-Sony, it broke the record for the biggest Tuesday gross ever and the biggest Tuesday opening day ever (both held by Transformers, grossed $27 million over its first day ($4 million of that, or 11.4%, was from IMAX engagements).  But, as you recall, Transformers had $8.8 million worth of 8pm-12am sneak previews on Monday that year, giving the film a 1.25 day total of $36 million.  So Transformers needed 1.25 days to do what The Amazing Spider-Man did in 24 hours.  But The Amazing Spider-Man has 3D bumps and inflation to reckon with.  Inflation alone would put Transformers's opening 1.25 days at about $42 million, which is about what Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made ($43 million) on its first 1.25 days this time last year.  So it appears offhand that The Amazing Spider-Man will perform, in terms of weekend multipliers, somewhere between 4x and 4.6x its opening day number, or about what Transformers (4.3x - $155m/$36m), Transformers 3 (4.1x - $180m/$43m), Spider-Man 2 (4.5x - $180m/$40m), Hancock (4.6x - $112m/$24m), and Superman Returns (4.6x - $97m/$21m) did over their respective July 4th six-day "weekends". The outlier is War of the Worlds, which opened with $21 million on a Wednesday and made it to $112 million by Monday, a 5x weekend multiplier. As such, expect The Amazing Spider-Man to gross between $140 million and $162 million by Sunday night, with an off-chance of it earning as much as $175 million.

Scott Mendelson