It isn’t made very clear in the market title that you are talking about top 10 ALL TIME opening week gross.

HaveOne: I’m not talking about the all-time gross, just the opening-week gross for the summer of 2008. But I’ll reword slightly for clarity. In other words, there will be 10 winning movies in this market. Thanks.

“The Strangers” topped out at $28.5MM for first 7 days, below the $30MM threshold for cash out.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?sortdate=2008-06-05&p=.htm

Out of curiousity Box Office Mojo shows Hancock with ~$6MM on July 1 but still shows offical opening date as July 2. Seems to be an excluded sneak preview (e.g. this article) but thought I’d double check what your interpretation would be.

Yes, that’s an excluded sneak preview. That’s the way Box Office Mojo is treating it (calling today, July 2, the opening day, even though it earned a substantial amount on July 1), so that’s the way I’m handling it.

And I’ve tentatively listed it 6th, based on opening-day totals. But since opening day was a Wednesday, I expect it’ll end up ranking higher, possibly even 3rd by the middle of next week. But then, again, I could be wrong.

What’s interesting about this market at the moment is that there will be 10 winning stocks, but there are only nine right now priced above $50. Somebody who’s a good movie forecaster could probably pick up a good number of inkles here.

Any reason the market for Journey to the Center of the Earth closed already? Didn’t the movie just open yesterday? it may not have been the best opening day, but with $6.75 MM for friday, isn’t it reasonable to at least let the movie run the week before closing it?

Because some traders are anxious get their hands on their money, and because I want to keep the market as efficient as possible, I try to close the markets as soon as I have enough hard numbers to make a call. In the case of JttCoftE, in its opening day it earned about half of what the current number 10 movie, Get Smart, did in its opening day. While it would certainly be mathematically possible for JttCoftE to make the top 10, it is so extremely unlikely that it doesn’t make much sense to me to keep the market open. (It’s kind of like we can call an election even though just 10 percent of the votes have been counted, unless it’s close.)

As it is, JttCoftE will be lucky to reach the $30 million point in its first week, and it probably will place behind some films that have already been closed out.

On the other hand, Hellboy also is running behind Get Smart. But it’s close enough that it still could catch up (although unlikely) and become the new number 10. So Hellboy is staying in the market until it’s clear (perhaps Wednesday or so) that it won’t catch up with Get Smart. (If it should pass Get Smart then I’ll close out Get Smart.)

fair enough. Thanks

[Off Topic] – Just saw Wall-E and it was fantastic! This movie is going to go on to do big things. Perhaps an Oscar market for Wall-E is in order.

It definitely has had good reviews. For what it’s worth, two of my sons saw Mummy 3 yesterday and thought it was all-around awful (despite all that was spent on it).

Any plans to close out Hellboy?

Consider it done. I wanted to see Tuesday’s numbers first so that I wouldn’t be jumping the gun. The interesting thing to see coming up is whether The Dark Knight will, in its first day, pass the one-week take of Get Smart.

Sounds like a market to me… May as well cash out Dark Knight at 100 and Get Smart at 0 based on all of the press around TDK. :-) I wonder if there is anybody that tracks on-line ticket pre-sales…

I couldn’t find exact numbers, but a few web sites are reporting that The Dark Knight has broken the record for advance ticket sales. That’s probably enought to justify closing it out, but I’ll wait until I see the numbers Saturday afternoon and if people want to pick up a couple inkles before then they can.

how can you cash out a movie that opened yesterday when the market states that the payouts will be based on the first week’s performance? (plus the non-preliminary numbers aren’t even posted yet on box office mojo, which is the source you say you’re using)

See my answer above of July 13. I closed out Swing Vote because it had less than $2 million on its opening day. (It had a bit over $6 million in its first weekend and is likely to end up with less than $10 million for the week, which is less than any of the top 10 films had in their opening days.) While it is theoretically possible that it could earn more than $66 million in the following six days (or $60 million on Monday through Thursday), a miracle would be required for that to happen. I haven’t closed anything early unless there was support from real numbers to do so (even though it was tempting to cash out Dark Knight based on presales alone). The purpose of doing this is to speed payments to traders as is indicated in the market description.

If there’s any reasonable chance at all that a film, based on the BOM numbers, can make it into the top 10, I won’t close it. Mummy 3 remains open for trading, for example, even though its odds at this point of catching up with Narnia 2 seem quite remote. (Barring any surprises, I’ll probably close it once there are some midweek numbers available. But if it’s close to catching up with Narnia 2, I’ll wait until Thursday’s numbers come in.) In the case of Swing Vote, there wasn’t even a close call.