Hear ye! Hear ye! This whole year, we have heard the death knell from the media that going to the theaters was a dead form of entertainment, primarily because box office grosses were recording the worst receipts since box office grosses were tracked, around '85. Well, it has always been my perspective that this type of talk was highly premature, especially regarding the line-up of holiday films. And hello, I was right. 2005 will still fall approximately 7% behind last year's overall grosses, but in the end, this year will rank as one of the top five grossing years. (I'm still trying to track down the article I read that backs me up on this fact.)
How did 2005 compare to 2004?
Last year, 23 films crossed the $100 million mark at the box office. This year, only seventeen films met this milestone. However, 7 films in 2005 grossed over $200 million, compared to only 6 films in 2004.
"To read some reporting on the film industry over the past six months, you'd think the sky was falling," wrote Dan Glickman of The Wall Street Journal. "[A]nd the ‘H’ on the ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign was about to fall off and crash down onto Mulholland Drive....but...reports of the death of our industry have been greatly exaggerated."
Over the past several weeks, millions of people have lined up at theaters around the world to see a boy wizard, a magical lion, a beautiful geisha, an American music legend, the greatest ape of all time, and many others. According to reports last week, this holiday period has shown promising box-office take--an 8% increase compared with the same holiday period last year, in fact. Just two weekends before Christmas, box-office receipts were up 18% compared with the same weekend last year--a clear indication that film companies are answering consumer demand for good movies. Internationally, taken together the three top grossing motion pictures in the box office made more than $110 million, almost double what the three top-grossing pictures in the same weekend of 2004 managed to pull in.
The opening weekend of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was the biggest debut ever for the comparable weekend and the second highest December opening of all time. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the 20th film to cross the $700 million mark in world-wide box office.
Here are the films that grossed over $100 million dollars domestically:
1 Revenge of the Sith ($380.26)
2 Harry Potter 4 ($263.14)
3 War of the Worlds * ($234.28)
4 Wedding Crashers ($209.22)
5 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory ($206.46)
6 Batman Begins ($205.34)
7 The Chronicles of Narnia ($200.00+)
8 Madagascar * ($193.14)
9 Mr. & Mrs. Smith ($186.34)
10 Hitch ($177.58)
11 The Longest Yard *( $158.12)
12 Fantastic Four ($154.70)
13 King Kong ($150.00+)
14 Chicken Little ($130.27)
15 Robots $128.20)
16 The Pacifier($113.01)
17 The 40 Year-Old Virgin ($109.24)
11:06:06 PM  | |
|
