(Courtesy:portfolio.com)
It was the strength of Spider-Man 3's opening this past May that started the heady speculation: could Hollywood earn a record-setting $4 billion at the box office this summer. Here we are at the tail end of the dog days in August, and the answer is an emphatic yes. This past weekend's new theatrical releases were hardly anything to get excited about, but they were enough, with the help of Superbad (the number one movie for the second straight week with $18 million in ticket sales) and The Bourne Ultimatum (number two with $12.4 million), to push total summer grosses in the United States and Canada to $4 billion for the first time ever, topping the $3.95 billion set in 2004. But this new record should be tempered by the fact the actual number of tickets sold is no where near a new high, and the record is a result of higher ticket costs. Factoring in higher admisssion prices, 606 million movie tickets have been sold this summer--sixth best for modern Hollywood (in 2002, a record-setting 653.5 million tickets were sold). It's tough to single out any one factor for this summer's success, though it would be easy to call it the summer of the threequel (Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3 and Pirates 3 are the top three domestic earners, each taking in more than $300 million). But any way you slice it, this is good news for the film industry. "Every year we look for constant growth in a mature business," Fox distribution president Bruce Snyder recently told EW. "It doesn't seem right, but we're not very smart." Labor Day bookends of the 18-week summer season, and the total take is expected to be around $4.15 billion.
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