Top 10 Weekly Box Office Sales

[mrstickball]

FaRmLaNd said:
Well I don't know about IMDB. But the other trackers are still saying that the current 2nd week numbers are estimates and not actuals. The actuals usually get released a bit later.

For example. http://boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/ Notice how it says studio estimates? The original estimates at box office mojo for the first week of AVATAR were a couple of million lower then the final number (which was $77,025,481 as reported by both box office mojo and the-numbers.com) so this can make a difference.

I don't know how accurate IMDB is either. Since I don't follow it for box office tracking? Does anyone know? Since those numbers you've provided seem a tad lower then several other tracking sites? I don't know which sites considered the most accurate to be honest.

Box Office Mojo is the most reliable site out there. They do track studio actuals when available, and are usually one of the first sites to report sales data.

The reason the estimates were lower is that they were indeed studio estimates - and even they thought Avatar was not going to do as well as it did.

Here is the deal with tracking, on a day-by-day basis:

• Saturday morning: Friday estimates come in. Usually very close, if not right on the line of being actual numbers
• Sunday morning: Weekend estiamates. This uses Friday estimates + Saturday estimates + Sunday projections (which is where the inaccuracy usually lies)
• Monday afternoon: Weekend actuals. Studios finally report actual ticket data on Mondays.

This should help explain the American BO cycle. Most websites and news stories use estimated data rather than actuals because its quicker. There is no way to really fix for inaccuracies concerning weekend data. For Avatars first week, we had a big snowstorm on the east coast, followed by higher-than-expected numbers for Sunday (which is usually down by a very predicable number) which caused the issues.

I am going to see Avatar sometime at my local IMAX 3D. It costs a whopping $14 per ticket. No wonder Avatar is doing so well - they are killing everyone with the 3D prices.

And if anyone is interested: Avatar is absolutely RIPPING IT UP overseas. It is at $405 million outside the US, with Russia being one of the hottest markets at $45m in two weeks. That may not seem much compared to $200m in the US, but for Russia, that is about two days away from being the highest grossing movie in history.