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The box office didn’t quite post the spectacular numbers of recent weeks, but the top ten was still comfortably above the comparable weekend in 2007. The weekend’s #1 pic was the big-screen version of retro spy-comedy TV series Get Smart, which opened with a stronger-than-expected $39 million (estimate). The Steve Carell-Anne Hathaway blockbuster received mostly mediocre notices from critics, but fared far better than the weekend’s #4 film - the other wide opener, Mike Myers’s The Love Guru, which seems to be a shoo-in at this point for the Worst Picture Razzie. The expensive tentpole pic tanked with an estimated $14 million.

Holdovers dominated the rest. Kung Fu Panda rose back up to #2, narrowly beating the second weekend of The Incredible Hulk which, unsurprisingly, fell hard after comic nerds descended upon it last weekend. The #5 film was The Happening, which fell almost 70%. M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t quite yet equate to box office poison, but he’s not far off.

Next weekend will be an interesting one to watch. The openers - Wall-E and Wanted - both have strong commercial prospects, and could also be (*gasp*) decent flicks. Wall-E in particular is an interesting gamble - will Charlie Chaplin-style humor translate for today’s ADD-infected kids? I think it will. This is a lush $180 million robot movie after all. My bet is for $65 million. Incredibles numbers.

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A movie starring Edward Norton as an angry green giant who says stuff like “HULK! SMASH!” soared to the top of the U.S. box office this weekend, with an opening take of $55.4 million. The Louis Leterrier-directed blockbuster is a virtual re-boot of Marvel’s lucrative “Hulk” franchise, which disappointed in its first cinematic outing in 2003 after a mauling by critics and audiences. The Incredible Hulk didn’t open quite as big as Hulk, but it might end up with more bank in the end - word-of-mouth for Ang Lee’s Hulk was atrocious, leading to embarrassing drop-offs. All in all, this was a successful re-try, even if the movie itself is a bit bland.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening opened in third with an impressive $30.5 million, proving to naysayers that his name on the marquee can still open a thriller. You can expect a massive second-weekend drop though. Audiences are hating the film, as are their critical counterparts. Still, it’s certainly not as big of a disaster as Lady in the Water.

Kung Fu Panda held up nicely for second place. Its $33.6 million weekend puts it at $117 million overall. The toon is currently running at the same pace as Pixar’s Cars. If lucky, Dreamworks could be looking at a $250 million final tally in the States.

For the third weekend in a row, the box office was red hot overall, and once again crushed year-ago levels. June 2008 will easily one of the strongest summer months in history, and should even the year out after a disappointing May (Speed Racer, Narnia) and the general slump leading in to the summer. Next weekend: The Love Guru and Get Smart. More $$ fireworks from mediocre movies! 

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The box office was smokin’ hot over the weekend of June 6-8, as two new films debuted to stellar results on top of strong holdovers. The box office hasn’t seen this kind of depth all year, and recorded the second-best June weekend ever (unadjusted for inflation, of course). After a solid May that underperformed last year’s blockbuster slate, the past two weekends have seen business rise greatly above year-ago levels. The rest of June could be just as strong.

Kung Fu Panda was tops with an estimated $60 million, making for Dreamworks Animation’s best non-sequel opening. The well-reviewed toon benefited from a paucity of options for kids, and has that market to itself until Wall-E takes over on June 27. Adam Sandler’s new laugher You Don’t Mess with the Zohan - which wasn’t treated as nicely by critics - came in second with a terrific $40 million. Holdovers Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and last week’s number one Sex and the City brought up the rear with $22.8 and $21.3 million respectively. SATC dropped over 60% from last weekend due to the initial fan rush, but at almost $100 million and counting, it is still a major success that has defied analyst predictions. Iron Man posted another solid hold with $7.5 million ($288 million cume, the year’s biggest hit thus far), while The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian crumbled once again, posting $5.5 million for a relatively weak $125 million cume. The first film in the franchise made nearly $300 million domestically. With international receipts added, Prince Caspian will still be a hit. Disney now has a couple years to figure out how to market the next entry (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) more successfully.

The coming weekend will undoubtedly post great numbers once again. This week’s top films should see reasonable declines, and two new (potential) blockbusters open, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and Marvel’s re-do of one of the comic giant’s more popular characters, The Incredible Hulk. The same weekend last year produced a $58.1 million opening for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, while second place was Ocean’s 13 with only $19.7 million in its second weekend. The 2008 results will lay waste to those numbers.

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Last week, from my cubicle, I out-predicted all the major box office analysts by foretelling a $28 million opening day for a movie about four fortysomething women wandering Manhattan in high heels. The actual number was about $27 million, or close to double what everyone else was predicting. Haha!

I’m a bit puzzled as to why Hollywood is in such a frenzy over the $57 million opening weekend of Sex and the City. It was an enormously popular series. Its fan base is fiercely loyal, and excitement was at fever pitch. Sure, it’s impressive that a film with a niche audience (roughly 85% of attendees this weekend were women, which is astoundingly high) pulled in these kind of numbers, but it shows once again how much contempt the Hollywood powers-that-be have for their female audience. Nikki Finke has an interesting ongoing post over at Deadline Hollywood about Warner chief Jeff Robinov’s idiotic comments about female-driven movies, and how Warner may now reconsider the marketing push for The Women, which is already looking very promising. Why a low-budget ($16.5 million, reportedly), star-studded (Eva Mendes, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, etc.) rom-com with a great script wouldn’t receive a major marketing push is beyond me. The (male) studio cronies don’t want the ladies encroaching on their superhero tentpoles, apparently.

Beyond SATC, the marketplace is showing a lot of depth after a so-so May. Indiana Jones ranked second with $44.8 million (down 55%), The Strangers beat predictions with a $21 million opening (the biggest for a horror flick this year), Iron Man continued showing great legs with $13.5 million in its fifth outing, and other films showed small declines. The box office was up substantially over last year, and will continue on its up streak this coming weekend with the openings of Kung Fu Panda and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Last year’s #1 on that frame was Ocean’s 13 with less than $40 million. Indiana Jones and SATC will do at least that much together, ignoring the two big openers and better-than-average drops for The Strangers and Iron Man.

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Despite Manohla Dargis’s unadulterated savagery in The New York Times (really…what did you expect?), I’m prepared to make a rather obscene box office prediction. After asking the shoe gods for help in predicting this maddening opening weekend - when it isn’t fanboys lining up as usual, things become difficult to foretell - I’ve decided to up my weekend prediction for Sex and the City. Or maybe just for opening day. I’m now guessing the Fab Four will do $28 million on Friday alone, and then suffer huge drops. Yes, I know that’s only $2 million less than the opening Friday of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The girls can do it. The advance sales are jaw-dropping in the urban markets. Hopefully I’m not eating my words come Saturday! 

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Box office analysts are facing quite a pickle with their projections for the Fab Four’s opening weekend. As every part of the industry is completely dominated by male stars, male interests, and male fanboys, no one knows what to make of these crazy movies that come along once in a while that women are actually interested in. In other words, films that do not devote 30+ minutes to the building of metal suits used for flying around like a jackass saving helpless big-breasted damsels.

Of course I’m talking about Sex and the City: The Movie, which could be the biggest female-skewing blockbuster of all time (unless you count The Sound of Music). Opening day ticket sales on Fandango are absolutely through the roof. Though you can’t count on the New York City media market as an accurate gauge of the country as a whole, it’s still telling that almost every single showing of SATC between 5 pm and midnight on Friday in Manhattan is sold out. That’s nuts. Star Wars doesn’t hit those kind of numbers. My guess, woefully uneducated, is that SATC will do AT LEAST $45 million this weekend, and could do much more.

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Despite being the slowest Memorial Day weekend at the box office in over five years, Steven Spielberg’s new franchise blockbuster cleaned up, grossing a commendable $127 million in four days and $152 million since its Thursday debut. That’s fat cash for the ancient franchise, which had its last installment in 1989 with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The awkwardly titled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull flushed the competition, with the weekend’s number two film grossing only $30 million. That film, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, has disappointed at the ticket booth, proving far less successful than its predecessor. With Speed Racer’s crash and burn two weeks ago, the marketplace doesn’t have the depth it typically does at Memorial Day. Look for that to change on May 30 when Sex and the City hits theatres and Indy scores a respectable drop in his second outing.

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Gee, I was way off with my box office predictions this time around. Perhaps it’s all the unbridled Indiana Jones anticipation in the air that’s making me crazy, thinking that a PG Tolkien derivative was going to bust out $100 million at the U.S. box office. If you cut that roughly in half, you get the $56.6 million estimated weekend for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which most analysts had pegged at around $80 million. The first installment made $65 million. Ouch.

In retrospect this makes sense. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a much-beloved tale, but the rest of the allegorically rich C.S. Lewis Narnia stories have never been nearly as popular. This entry is supposedly more of a straight-up fantasy adventure, losing much of the Christian overtones of the original (even though the first film toned down the deafening Christian allegory of the source novel). The trailers haven’t been that exciting either - it looks like more of the same, with more handsomely staged battle sequences. Plus, while Hollywood likes to trump box office receipts as evidence of quality, the first film made its cash on name recognition and a paucity of good family fare for the holidays, not necessarily on hot buzz for Lion. It was pretty dumb to open this in the summer.

Iron Man continued its strong performance in second place with an impressive $31.2 million estimate. That puts the metallurgy documentary at an excellent $222 million. It now has an outside chance of breaking $300 million, something no one expected a month ago. Speed Racer continues as one of the biggest mega-budget bombs of all time, falling nearly 60% to roughly $7 million. International receipts have been pathetic as well. At this point, the film might not even break $100 million worldwide. The Wachowskis are going to have difficulty getting their fetishist pet projects (in this case it was CARS CARS CARS) off the ground at Warner, which gave them whatever they wanted for Racer after the phenomenal success of the Matrix films.

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I’m pretty bullish on the box office prospects of Walt Disney and Walden Media’s second installment of their blockbuster Chronicles of Narnia franchise, Prince Caspian. Though it looks just as bland and visually uninspired as the first attempt (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), critics are weighing in with mostly positive reviews, pointing out in particular the tighter narrative and increased sense of gravitas. I suppose the latter is appropriate for a movie about anthropomorphic rodents and Jesus-Lions. Speaking of Jesus, click here.

The usual suspects are predicting around $80 million for this juggernaut, a solid improvement over the first film’s $65 million opening in December 2005. I’m not 100% confident with my prediction, but I’d peg Prince Caspian more in the $90-100 million range. Iron Man has breathed new life into a dull spring box office, and Speed Racer clearly wasn’t the blockbuster Hollywood was hoping for. Families are ready for some lightly drawn Christian allegory - bring on that doe-eyed Prince!

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Hollywood is giggly this first week of the lovely month of May, as the box office is finally showing signs of life. Cue the renewed editorials on blockbuster longevity, excitable quotes from studio executives (especially those at Marvel Studios) about the ‘quality’ of ‘our product’, and of course the countless exercises in repetition as exclamations of shattered records reverberate from coast to coast.

Is it really a surprise that Iron Man opened to $100 million? No. Sure, it wasn’t tracking quite that big, and a month ago most were predicting $50-60 million. But the marketing was enormously loud, and the buzz was well above-average. For a movie based on a comic book targeting males under 30, that’s all it takes. Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow were bonuses for adults, the market has been near-dead, and it featured a dude in a metal suit flying around with jet fighters. I’ll admit this opening was somewhat notable in size - it surpassed last summer’s Transformers, a far superior popcorn flick - but this is nothing Hollywood should be getting its panties in a twist about. Of course, Marvel has already announced about ten upcoming comic movies. Groan.

Nothing else was going on at the box office, though Patrick Dempsey’s swoon-over-me vehicle Made of Honor performed surprisingly well with a $15 million opening. Next weekend? Speed Racer cruises into theatres, probably to paltry results…trailers that give you headaches usually don’t go over too well.