Memorial Day Box Office

Maybe the movie industry isn’t in such bad shape after all. Things got off to a shaky start at the box office this weekend when on Friday all three theater blockbusters, Revenge of the Sith, Madagascar, and The Longest Yard pulled in pretty weak numbers for what should have been a bang up money-making weekend for Hollywood. We worried. We shouldn't have, theater goers were just waiting until Monday.

There’s been a lot of talk this year about declining box office totals. Ticket sales have been off, but concerns were easily dismissed since let’s be honest… the first half of this year’s crop of movies has been one of the worst. Why should anyone go to a theater? Now big summer movies are hitting, some of them even pretty good. Guess what? Audiences showed up. Theater attendance built throughout the weekend, and all three big flicks mentioned above scored huge numbers on Memorial Day.

Both The Longest Yard and Madagascar broke records by becoming respetively the second and third biggest non-number one openings in history, surpassed only by The Day After Tomorrow. In it’s second week of release, Revenge of the Sith recorded the seventh all time biggest 4-day Memorial Day Weekend total. Impressive when you consider the competition it was up against. Throw all of that in a pot and you have the third biggest money-making weekend in cinema history. Nearly 177 million dollars flowed through the American cinema this holiday weekend. Hard to call that a decline.

So let’s tap the break a little on the whole doom of cinema fervor and look at the facts. This year’s movies have sucked, and now that there’s actually something out there folks like seeing, they’re going. But just in case, I’m going to tidy up our DVD section.

Here’s a quick look at the top five 4-day (Friday – Monday) Memorial Day Weekend totals. To see the normal top ten for the weekend (Friday – Sunday) click here.