Lessons of Last Weekend's Box Office

There are people who decry the obsession with movie grosses. But let's face it, studios make movies to make money, and they care what movies make -- it drives the business.

So let's look at Thanksgiving weekend. These are the estimated grosses for the 3 days/total grosses so far, in millions.

#1 HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (54.9/201.1 first ten days). No real surprise here, though this is a movie that Hollywood should take a real lesson from. If you make sequels that are better (and HP4 isn't a perfect movie, but it is a solid, entertaining one), you will make lots of money.

#2 WALK THE LINE (19.7/54.7). Another encouraging lesson; this is a movie that's doing fairly well because it is good. If the last few years have shown anything, it is that biopics are very review-driven, but if you make a good one, people will come.

#3 YOURS, MINE AND OURS (17.5/24.5 since Wednesday). Reviews were terrible, but it's a high-concept family movie during the holidays, with a couple of name actors to hook the parents. High concept kids movies are probably one of the most commercial genres out there, because the movies don't have to be great to make money.

#4 CHICKEN LITTLE (12.4/118.2). See above.

#5 RENT (10.7/18.1 since Wednesday). Reviews on this were very mixed, but they sold it pretty well, completely hiding the fact that AIDS plays a major, major part in the movie and that a lot of the characters are gay. Something tells me it's going to drop like a stone, though, and be hard to find in cinemas around Christmas.

#6 JUST FRIENDS (9.3/13.6 since Wednesday). Not bad for a movie with no big stars that got a lot of terrible reviews, though some oddly good ones as well -- Entertainment Weekly, which is getting more and more unreliable, gave Just Friends a better review than Harry Potter. It probably benefitted a lot from the fact that there were a lot of movies out there that skewed younger and older, and they have been advertising the hell out of this.

#7 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (7.0/15.9). Not bad for an artsy literary tale, and it's hard not to feel good about the fact that this is going to wind up making a lot more than "Domino". I think movies like this suffer from the fact that they just seem like the latest British classic in a long line of similar movies, but it shows that a little buzz can carry it along. Plus Kiera is adorable, and Jena Malone is in it too.

#8 DERAILED (4.7/29.4). Given the largely bad reviews it got, this didn't do terribly, which is proof that name actors and the promise of a thriller will get people to go see something. Still, if it had been good, it would have made a lot more money.

#9 IN THE MIX (4.5/6.2 since Wednesday). Bad reviews, but this is a largely review-proof genre, though one in which most releases tend to top off in the $15-$25 total gross level. They wisely changed the title of this one too; up until about a month ago, the name of the film was "Dying For Dolly", which would have been box office death.

#10 THE ICE HARVEST (3.7/5.1 since Wednesday). Disaster. The reviews weren't that bad at all, but they never figured out a way to sell this; the ads had no real story hook and not enough charming John Cusack. I read somewhere that they released this on the day before Thanksgiving hoping to cash in on some Billy Bob/"Bad Santa" magic, but "Bad Santa" and "The Ice Harvest" are clearly two very different kinds of movies, This one probably would have done a lot better had it been released in October or February, where it would have had a lot less good movies to compete with.

#11 ZATHURA (3.7/26.0). This got fairly good reviews, but in the battle of the kid-oriented fantasy films Harry Potter smushed it.

#12 JARHEAD (2.9/59.4). For a rather downbear war movie without any real combat, $59 million ain't bad. One of those movies that I liked, though I'm not sure I'll ever actually watch again.