My personal favorite of all the big summer films, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest stood firm in its position as the top money earner of the U.S. box office for a third consecutive week!
The film earned 35 million USD over the weekend, dropping 43.8% from last weekend's ticket sales. Of the top 20 films, it has the highest per-theater gain, at an average of 8500 USD. Pirates is the fastest film to have reached 300 million USD, doing so in 16 days, which is ahead of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, the latter having held the previous record at 17 days.
Pirates is also the first film since M. Night Shyamalan's Signs to rank first place for three consecutive weeks, and its total now stands at 321 million USD.
Unfortunately, Shyamalan's latest film, Lady in the Water, was ranked in the third position in its opening weekend, earning 18 million USD. I'm not sure if this is low or not (the film is budgeted at 55 million USD), but it's Shyamalan's weakest opening since The Sixth Sense.
In the second position is Monster House, which earned 23 million USD, and according to Box Office Mojo, this exceeds Sony's expectations by 3 million USD.
Clerks II and My Super Ex-Girlfriend opened in the sixth and seventh positions respectively, earning a little bit below 10 million USD. For the low-budget Clerks, this is a respectable opening, but I think Super Ex was expected to perform a little bit better than it did.
Finally, You, Me and Dupree and Little Man continue to perform steadily, taking the fourth and fifth positions of the box office earnings for this past weekend.
To perform your own analyses of the U.S. box office, go to Box Office Mojo for more details!
