- The Guardian,
- Tuesday August 28 2007
The teen comedy Superbad bubbled to the top of the box office for the second week, lifting Hollywood to its first $4bn (£2bn) summer, and takings at cinema tills are expected to end the season next week at $4.15bn.
Although the number of tickets actually sold is still below peak levels (600m, compared with 650m five years ago), the significance to studio owners is that a perilous slide into oblivion has been checked.
Summer movies had started to acquire a bad name among critics and viewers, with studios using the quieter months of July and August to tuck away films that stank. But this year there has been a noticeable glut of blockbusters, and the audience has responded in kind.
"July and August usually are the doldrums, as people perceive that period as a studio dumping ground," said Patrick Corcoran, director of research at the National Association of Theatre Owners. "But this year there have been a succession of surefire titles as well as some surprise hits." Among those surprises is Knocked up, Judd Apatow's affectionate look at the baby business, which has taken $147m. That film stands out as the exception to the rule in the current movie top 10 - the rule being that sequels rule. No fewer than six are sequels. The top taker is Spider-Man 3, which has grossed $336m, with Shrek the Third following at $320m.
The other theme of the summer is that the American movie watcher is obsessed with creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night. Spider-Man and ogres aside, the top 10 films feature pirates, metamorphosing robots, and wizards.
With all that spookiness around, there is also an understandably thick strain of muscle-bound hard men coming to the rescue - Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard and Matt Damon in the Bourne Ultimatum, a film which also gives the Guardian a starring role, (though Damon, it must be noted, proves insufficiently hard to save the hapless Guardian reporter). The Bourne Ultimatum climbed one place to the number two slot, grossing an estimated $185.1m in four weeks.
