The X-Men: The Last Stand expoded to an estimated $107 million three-day opening, which makes it the largest Memorial Day opening, and the fourth-largest in history.
The film, made by 20th Century Fox was distributed to 3,690 theaters and took in a huge $28,997 per theater.
Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations said "People had such a huge awareness of the movie that it just translated into these huge numbers."
The numbers are connected to the huge base of fans from the comic book heroes and the first two "X-Men" films, along with good reviews and great promotion.
All-time, the movie started only behind "Spider-Man," "Star Wars: Episode III" and "Shrek 2" for an opening weekend total.
As far a Memorial Day openers, "X-Men" went way beyond its former first-place holder "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" which opened at $72 million in 1997.
Final figures will be out Monday.
Given how bad this "final" chapter was, I think you can attribute its large box-office bounty mostly to the goodwill built up by Bryan Singer with the first two great films and the fact that this was the only major movie opening on Memorial Day weekend (wtf!)
Posted by: Keith Demko | May 29, 2006 6:49 AM | Permalink to Comment