to be honest I think it makes sense to open on Thursday night rather then Midnight...

It's stupid.

BOM used to list out the separation between pre-midnights and midnights because the studios would actually report the split.

The problem has become that every movie now wants to start prior to midnight but be treated like a true midnight. So now studios want to get away with not splitting it out.

It seems sort of like performance enhancing drugs - one athlete gets away with it and sets a record, and then another, and so why should any given studio now have to report pre-midnight numbers separately?

We do we really even know for sure that all the midnight numbers reported in the past were true midnight starts? Surely many of them we thought were true midnight were actually pre-mid starters. This might actually be why BOM never started a midnight gross chart.

I really don't care when they start, but I would prefer standardization.

Even moreso though I want to know the box office breakdowns for the first several showtimes by time of day and theater count.

It feels like we're going backwards, when there's no excuse not to go forwards. We have the technology to report this and the demand is there. I'm annoyed.

Yeah, the whole shift from actual midnight showings to Thursday night previews that aren't reported separately is rather dispiriting. Any achievements from this point on are going to be a lot less impressive and lamer. I almost don't want to update the current chart with these new numbers.

YOU WILL UPDATE IT AND YOU WILL LIKE IT

Furthermore, the lack of resources available regarding the BO makes our prediction methods a bit stone-aged. We're all essentially ballparking when there's tons of statistical tools out there for this kind of stuff. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to use regression for BO-predictions, but we can't because all we have available is what's up on BOM.

Even so I doubt any film will break midnight record or preview record for a few years... CF I think will not reach the levels of DH2 or its opening day.

Next film breaking opening day record is likely TA 2 but that will be due to it actually making a lot of Money on Friday instead of previews.

I meant that in previous years, 8-10pm showings were NOT included into a films opening day figure. They were counted separate as a daily gross.

A few examples:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?pa ... bbean3.htm
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?pa ... loaded.htm
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?pa ... mers06.htm

The $13.24 million Pirates 3 earned on Thursday was just those pre-midnight showings. Same for The Matrix Reloaded's $5 million Wednesday and Transformer's $8.8 million Monday.

But now, however, these early showings seem to be included with the midnights and counted toward the opening day figure

Oh I see.

I don't mind that the Thursday previews are included with Friday now as much as I'm bothered that older films still have them separated. It's just not accurate for any of the charts on BOM. At least go back and add the $5m to The Matrix Reloaded Thursday gross and so on.

This

But we don't want to forget the Thursday grosses for older movies. If it was all changed, we would eventually forget.

In prep for Superman. Bump.

Now You See Me did 1.5 Million from Thursday night shows and After Earth did 1 Million.

So would we add This Is The End's 2.2 mil to this?

1st post needs some serious updating... (last time December 14th)

I feel like this thread should be used merely for films that specifically open at midnight and maybe we should make a thread for exclusively preview+midnights. Man of Steel is the only one recently which had only midnights minus the Walmart #.

THURSDAY 9:30 PM, 2ND UPDATE: Sources tell me that Thursday late shows and Friday midnights for Pacific Rim are headed over $3M tonight and “could catch or pass” last month’s late shows for World War Z at $3.6M. I’ve just heard that Growns-Ups 2 late shows also are bigger than expected even than it’s not an R-rated comedy. “Maybe as high as $2M for a PG-13, family, non-fanboy, no IMAX movie,” an insider says. All this raising hopes for the weekend.

http://www.deadline.com/2013/07/pacific ... -roll-out/

That would be great for both.

Outstanding, if Pacific Rim manages a 45m+ opening I will consider it a breakout success.

hm... so Catching Fire doesn't really count for this since the 8 PMs are kinda cheating. lol so I think less than 35 would be really surprising.

Updated with these numbers in a new list on the main post. I'll try hunting down some other numbers from this year.

Great work - here's some older films' pre-midnight grosses you could add, from the honest days when pre-midnights were not included in the weekend. Sorry for lack of links - many if not all of these though are actually broken down in BOM since there was honesty in reporting until recently.

Movie, Premidnight Gross (m), Premidnight Th Ct (when known)

Independence Day,11.1,
Men in Black,4.8,
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,2.5,
Austin Powers in Goldmember,3.6,
The Matrix Reloaded,5.0,
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,4.0,
Superman Returns,3.0,
Snakes on a Plane,1.4,
Shrek the Third,0.9,1,000
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End,10.2,
Transformers,8.8,
Iron Man,3.5,
Sex and the City,3.0,
Hancock,6.8,
Star Trek,4.0,
Clash of the Titans (2010),2.7,
Super 8,1.0,335
Transformers: Dark of the Moon ,5.5,2700
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol,0.6,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011),1.6,2914

I think it was 6.5 or thereabouts.