New at The Numbers: This Day in Movie History
July 26, 2017
Here at The Numbers, we strive to improve your reading experience by adding more features we believe you will find interesting. Today, we are introducing On this Day, a page that shows events on each date in movie history. You can reach it by clicking on dates on many pages across the site, and also via the News pull-down menu at the top of each page. Unfortunately today, July 26th, is kind of a boring day at the box office, as July 26th has only landed on a Friday twice in the past two decades. So let’s look at another day chosen entirely at random, August 19th. The date is obviously important to history, but let’s look at the day in terms of box office numbers.
The first chart on the August 19th page is the top ten list of the biggest single days. Here we see Superbad has a comfortable lead over The Expendables 2. Next up is the chart for opening days. Since daily box office numbers were only widely released from 1998 and onward, not every day has a lot of new releases to talk about. For example, the third best opening on August 19th is held by War Dogs, which opened on that day in 2016. However, it didn’t earn enough to make the top ten on the overall chart. The final box office chart is the weekend chart, which includes all years where August the 19th was a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Mortal Kombat, which predates studios releasing daily box office numbers, earns third place on this chart. Next up is upcoming movies released on this day. Since August 19th doesn’t land on a Friday again till 2022, there are not a lot of films already announced for this date.
You want to see a stark contrast in box office power a single day can make, check out Christmas Day and Christmas Eve. Christmas Day is one of the most lucrative days of the year. Christmas Eve is a dead zone. We already have films scheduled to open on Christmas day for next year, 2019, and even 2020. On the other hand, we only have daily numbers for one film that opened on Christmas Eve and if I found out it opened on Christmas Eve due to a booking error, I wouldn’t be shocked.
Finally, there’s births and deaths. For example, sharing my birthday is Lawrence Rory Guy, better know by his screen name, Angus Scrimm, who is best know for playing The Tall Man in the Phantasm franchise.
We hope you enjoy this new feature and find it interesting. We plan to add more features in the future, and welcome suggestions for additions to the site.
Filed under: Analysis, Phantasm, Angus Scrimm