Over the combined Monday through Tuesday period (April 4-5), Hop leads the way with $4.9 million. Source Code ($2.6 million) and Insidious ($2.2 million) follow in the same order they did in their collective opening weekend. In its third Monday and Tuesday, Limitless continues to hang around the top 5 films (with $1.7 million). Clearly, Hop is the most significant film of the current crop of films given its strong #1 position in the early weekday ranking. To put Hop's performance in perspective, we have compared it to Rango and How to Train Your Dragon, two early spring animated/family movies with similar opening weekends (around $40 million). The first Monday-Tuesday for Hop is extremely close to that for Rango, but both films pale in comparison to How to Train Your Dragon.
Apr 4-5, 2011 Mon-Tue % of Opening
Hop (Uni) $4.9 %13
Source Code (Summit) $2.6 %17
Insidious (FilmDis) $2.2 %17
Limitless (Rel) $1.7 n/a
Diary Wimpy Kid 2 (Fox) $1.3 n/a
Mar 7-8, 2011
Rango (Par) $4.1 11%
Mar 29-30, 2010
How Train Dragon (DW) $9.6 22%
It turns out that How to Train Your Dragon's first Monday-Tuesday number is actually quite significant. We have seen that when the first Monday-Tuesday is about 20% of a film's opening weekend, the motion picture is on a track to have a very good second weekend and do what is fairly rare: match its opening weekend number in the period between the first Monday and its second Sunday. In Dragon's case the $9.6 million Monday-Tuesday total was 22% of its opening weekend. This set up a trajectory for a puny 34% decline in its second weekend and it earned more its first full week ($48 million between the first Monday and its second Sunday) than it did its opening weekend ($43.7 million). This does not happen often. Suddenly a film that looked like a $160 million picture based on its first weekend now looked like a $200+ million film.
Rango, in contrast, took in about 11% of its opening weekend during its first Monday-Tuesday period. A movie that was headed for $140 million based on the opening weekend was then downgraded to under $130 million based on second weekend returns. It appears that Hop is headed for a similar track (at 13%). Not bad at all -- it's just looking like it will perform like a "normal" film for the rest of their theatrical run, without extraordinary upside potential down the line.
Source Code and Insidious are both at 17% of the opening weekend on Monday-Tuesday. Solid numbers but with their lower base, there is not as much potential upside.
The unusually good performance of How to Train Your Dragon (very low second weekend decline, strong weekday numbers, the first full week beating the first weekend) are indications of the exceptional word of mouth that can translate to strong revenue on post-theater "windows". (For a discussion of movie windows such as pay-per-view, DVD, online, pay cable, cable television and broadcast television, see ShowbuzzDaily Basics.)
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