The studio projections are in for the weekend and it looks like {Eminem is going to post an impressive $54.5m debut, showing Britney and the like who’s boss.

Next weekend will promise to be even more intriguing, as we’ll see what sort of drop-off the film experiences. In the current market, it’s not unusual to see a 40-50% drop in take (example: in its second weekend, Jackass: The Movie dropped 44.1%). This is due to the studios’ strategy of opening a film as wide as possible in order to a) demand a larger chunk in revenue sharing from the exhibitors and b) outrun bad word-of-mouth (though the Internet has done something to inhibit this; see also Nash, Pluto).

That’s why I am fascinated by My Big Fat Greek Wedding. After 204 days in release, it gained 2.3% this weekend, for a cumulative total of $192.75m. (That places the $5m picture ahead of MiB II for the year, which had a $140m production budget.)

I hope this is a story that will be repeated even more in the future, as the landscape changes to allow different stories to have access to distribution — perhaps even those that don’t star white rappers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 10th, 2002 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Film.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.