Thursday schedules

Pacific Place
New	Holdovers	Leaving
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D - 15 showings	Back to 1942 - 1 showing (▼ 5)	Code Name Geronimo
	Jan Dara: The Beginning - 1 showing (▼ 2)	Iron Sky
	Killing Them Softly - 1 showing (▼ 3)	Red Dawn
	Life of Pi 3D - 4 showings (▼ 6)
	Rise of the Guardians (3D Eng.) - 1 showing (▼ 2)
	Cold War - 2 showings (▼ 4)
	Skyfall - 1 showing (▼ 4)

Palace APM
New	Holdovers	Leaving
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D - 17 showings	My Sassy Hubby - 7 showings (▼ 12)	The Unbelievable 2: Channeling the Spirits
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 1 showing	Rurouni Kenshin - 1 showing (▼ 4)	Jan Dara: The Beginning
	Life of Pi 3D - 6 showings (-)	Life of Pi
	Cold War - 4 showings (▼ 7)	Love in Time
		Skyfall

Festival Walk
New	Holdovers	Leaving
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D - 15 showings	My Sassy Hubby - 4 showings (▼ 6)	Caught in the Web
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 4 showings	Back to 1942 - 3 showings (▼ 5)	Code Name Geronimo
	Killing Them Softly - 1 showing (-)	Iron Sky
	Life of Pi 3D - 1 showing (▼ 5)	Red Dawn
	Rise of the Guardians (3D Eng.) - 1 showing (-)	Life of Pi
	Argo - 1 showing (▼ 2)
	Cold War - 2 showings (▼ 6)
	Skyfall - 1 showing (▼ 2)

Cityplaza
New	Holdovers	Leaving
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D - 11 showings	My Sassy Hubby - 3 showings (▼ 5)	Rurouni Kenshin
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 3 showings	Back to 1942 - 4 showings (▼ 5)	Killing Them Softly
	Life of Pi 3D - 5 showings (-)	Happiness Never Comes Alone
	Cold War - 1 showing (▼ 3)	Skyfall

The Hobbit doesn't make it to the 20 showings benchmark. Its extremely long runtime may have something to do with that. It'll make over 2m at least with these types of showtimes and ticket prices. 3-3.5m will depend on how well it does with walk-ups. My Sassy Hubby is the big winner this week. It not only supplanted Life of Pi to get the remaining 7 PM showtime this week but theaters have also given it more showtimes over Life of Pi. The biggest losers are Code Name Geronimo, Rurouni Kenshin, Killing Them Softly and Skyfall. All of them are getting squashed in at least 40% of theaters.

Now, introducing HFR 3D...

Langham Place
New	Holdovers	Leaving
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey HFR 3D - 6 showings	My Sassy Hubby - 7 showings (▼ 10)	A Ghost of A Chance
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D - 10 showings	Back to 1942 - 4 showings (▼ 5)	The Unbelievable 2: Channeling the Spirits
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 2 showings	Code Name Geronimo - 2 showings (▼ 4)	Red Dawn
	Life of Pi 3D - 5 showings (▼ 7)	Love in Time
	Cold War - 2 showings (▼ 4)	Sinister
		Skyfall

HFR won't get a lot of showtimes because it's being marketed as a special promotion. It's new and people might not want to see it so the majority of showings will still go to the regular 3D version. Theaters want to give viewers the chance to see it in regular 3D if they wish. That's why only a handful of theaters have picked up the HFR version even though 90% of HK theaters are digital. All of them can play HFR but they would rather stick with the known than the unknown.

Pre-sales for The Hobbit are depressing. They are worse than TASM and every other blockbuster that has come out in the past couple of years. Reasons could be several including high ticket prices, prequel factor, big November and big competition next weekend. The Hobbit remains the biggest threat to everyone but there will be something for everyone next weekend when a chick flick, action movie, cartoon, movie musical and Chinese action movie all come out. Also, let us not forget that November 2012 is the only November in all of history to gross more than 2m total every weekend and it broke the biggest November weekend twice in the same month. It's also the biggest November on record with almost 12.5m in the piggy bank. Moviegoers might not be as willing to part with their cash after watching Skyfall, Cold War and Life of Pi last month.

The Hobbit is looking at 30,000-35,000 admissions on opening day.

Sounds like a lot from only 51 cinemas in the country.

It isn't. Transformers 3 and Avengers did around 45,000. The last Harry Potter opened with more than 62,000.

On the weekend, Transformers 3 and The Avengers both topped 100,000 admissions on consecutive days.

And so it begins...

	Thursday adm.	(so far)		December 13
Rank	Title	LW	TW	% chg
1	The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	--	8,719	--
2	Life of Pi	3,486	1,547	-55.6%
3	My Sassy Hubby	2,016	1,267	-37.2%
4	Back to 1942	990	382	-61.4%
5	Cold War	1,048	350	-66.6%

The low start isn't an encouraging sign for The Hobbit, however, it still has very high ticket prices to offset any low admissions. I'm not too worried about the slightly disappointing admissions just yet.

Not a great hold for Life of Pi. It will fall about 55-60% for the day. It'll drop even harder this weekend. My Sassy Hubby had a good hold and could fall about 45% today. Back to 1942 and Cold War had poor holds although it is notable that Back to 1942 held a bit better than Cold War.

Ok, so after a few more hours of seeing where The Hobbit will finish on Thursday, I think I can confidently predict what will happen this weekend.

Thu: $300,000 (25,000 admissions)
Fri: $450,000 (+50%)
Sat: $950,000 (+111%)
Sun: $850,000 (-11%)
Total: $2,550,000 (+45% from ROTK's 7-day week)

The Hobbit should start off lower on Thursday but will pick up on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Saturday should see an enormous jump over 100% and weekend pre-sales are backing this scenario.

Christmas weekend should see a very strong hold, still in the 2m+ range.

Blue do you have any data about the openings of LOTR movies? How does this one compare to those?

Unfortunately, I have no data for the LOTR movies. Let's just say though that The Hobbit will blow all LOTR's openings away.

How much does it cost to watch The Hobbit in Singapore?

Bluebomb, do you like Eason Chan?

I've just got his "..3mm" remix album. It's pretty good. I wonder if you could answer this for me, is he normally like this or is he normally a ballad singer and this album is just a rare (weird) excursion?

I like him. His singing is pretty good but I've never heard any of his albums.

Why? What's up with the remix album?

IMAX is pretty costly anyways so here is the amount for different formats here

2D - $8.5-$9.5 (weekdays-weekends)
3D - $11m-$14m (weekdays-weekends)
HFR 3D - $13-$16 (weekdays-weekends)
(Can get discounts upto $2 with Credit Cards for these formats above)

IMAX 3D - $21m-$22m (weekdays-weekends)
IMAX HFR 3D - $22m-$23m (weekdays-weekends)

Dolby Atmos - $11.5-$13.5
Dolby Atmos 3D - $13-$16
(New Dolby technology - its amazing specially on a HUGE screens, requires auditorium based setup)

Too many options to choose from this weekend but other than special formats I don't see any special price increase. The regular 2D and 3D are available on most screens but I am surprised by HFR push here about 30%-40% screens have HFR (mostly the ones with 3D have HFR thsu regular 3D shows are lesser than usual).

It's a brilliant album, but I searched for his photo online and he appears to be a nice chap, smartly dressed, decent sort of ballad singer....not a dance/remix/electronica artist, so I just wondered if it was an official album or whether some techno guys just used his songs as sample. Also, the cover doesn't appear to be him either:



I'm not familiar with HK music. The album is only 5 songs long, or at least my version is. Just wondered if you could shed any light on him..

Not much really. He's pretty well known for ballads and soft pop songs. He was also dubbed the 3rd "god of song" recently.

Btw, the 3mm album should have 10 songs on it. This is the tracklist from the album:

01. 重口味
02. 非禮
03. Class
04. 碌卡
05. 笑死朕
06. 蚊
07. Let It Out
08. 習慣說
09. 信任
10. 完

	Thursday			December 13
Rank	Title	LW (adm.)	TW (adm.)	% chg (adm.)
1	The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	--	18,440	--
2	My Sassy Hubby	9,864	7,664	-22.3%
3	Life of Pi	9,443	5,142	-45.5%
4	Back to 1942	3,784	1,859	-50.9%
5	Cold War	4,386	1,658	-62.2%

Disappointing. I was counting on it hitting 25,000 today. It'll make over $200,000 with actuals but this wasn't what I had envisioned for The Hobbit. My Sassy Hubby had an excellent hold. Looks like this will make about 1.5m even though WOM is only so-so. Very good for Life of Pi but actuals should have it dropping over 50% due to the loss of IMAX. Back to 1942 had a decent hold. Cold War did poorly.

The one I have is a remix album, possibly not made by Eason then. Songs:

1. 重口味 (The Headmaster Mix)
2. 非礼 (Rude Mix)
3. 碌卡 (Light-Saber Mix)
4. Class (Extended Version)
5. 重口味 (Special Club Mix)

But that's the cover art above, and his name is on it. Hmm, a mystery.

It's him. I checked his Chinese wiki page.

How does The Hobbit's opening day fare compared to previous blockbusters?

Movie	OD admissions	% diff
The Hobbit	18,440
The Dark Knight Rises	38,750	-52.4%
The Amazing Spider-Man	32,580	-43.4%
The Avengers	47,317	-61.0%
Transformers 3	44,161	-58.2%
Harry Potter 7-2	62,089	-70.3%
Toy Story 3	32,294	-42.9%
Pirates 4	21,559	-14.5%
Shrek 3	49,634	-62.8%

Granted, everything else is from the summer. Still, The Hobbit should have done at least 20k.

Life of Pi actually beat its opening day admissions by 7%. Before anyone chides me over the fact that it's a 3 hour long movie, The Hobbit is a blockbuster with a built in fanbase. Life of Pi had none.

That doesn't mean The Hobbit can't recover from this setback. It can but it'll be a lot harder to increase over Christmas when you've did worse than theaters expected and with Jack Reacher, Twilight and Wreck-It Ralph all fighting for screens. I am still optimistic that The Hobbit will start to pull in admissions this weekend and it will spread over into Christmas but I'm definitely not liking this low start.

If we put in Mission Impossible 4 into the blockbuster mix...

Mission Impossible 4

24,390

-24.4%

Not an encouraging sign for The Hobbit.

Hoping for better from The Hobbit this weekend.

The original ten-song album and the five-song remix album were released 3 months apart by the same label. So both were legitimate releases. And the retro-disco cut of the album - 重口味 (The Headmaster Mix) is a singing collaboration between Eason Chan and Alan Tam, a hall-of-fame singer nicknamed "Headmaster". I love the song.

Thanks guys. Much appreciated. I love the remix album, very erratic and expressive disco tunes. I hope he makes more in this vein in the future.

The title of this thread should read "The Hobbit has a Hobbit-sized start".

Currently, for the day of Dec 14, 16,008 tickets for The Hobbit have been sold versus 5,028 for Life of Pi. In monetary term, The Hobbit has grossed HK$2,073,085 for the day versus Life of Pi's HK$432,060.

Wow at Life of Pi. Holding so well afer being out a while and against The Hobbit.

I never trust their grosses. It's always overestimated.

	Friday adm.	(so far)			December 14
Rank	Title	LW	TW	% chg	QD % chg
1	The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	--	10,307	--	+18.2%
2	Life of Pi	5,835	2,390	-59.0%	+54.5%
3	My Sassy Hubby	2,436	1,712	-29.7%	+35.1%
4	Back to 1942	1,104	534	-51.6%	+39.8%
5	Cold War	1,711	528	-69.1%	+50.9%

Not a great Friday start for The Hobbit. Huge crash for Life of Pi. My Sassy Hubby had another excellent hold. Back to 1942 is doing OK. Cold War is dead in the water.

								Dec. 6 WKD
Rank	Movie	Distributor	Weekend BO	Weeks	Engmnts	Eng. average	% change	B.O. Cume
1	Life of Pi	Fox	$736,015	3	62	$11,871	-35%	$4,040,277
2	My Wife Is 18 (2)	Gala Films	$406,323	1	39	$10,419		$406,323
3	Cold War	Edko Films	$177,595	5	39	$4,554	-51%	$5,300,127
4	Back to 1942	Lark Films Distribution	$158,350	1	21	$7,540		$158,350
5	Code Name: Geronimo	Intercontinental Films	$65,240	1	14	$4,660		$65,240
6	Skyfall	Sony	$64,564	6	18	$3,587	-52%	$4,762,129
7	Rurouni Kenshin	Panasia Films	$47,354	1	12	$3,946		$47,354
8	Fierce Wife: Final Episode, The	BVI	$44,306	1	11	$4,028		$44,306
9	Rise of The Guardians	Intercontinental Films	$39,010	3	17	$2,295	-51%	$307,269
10	Sutekina Kanashibari (Once in the Blue Moon)(Ghost Of A Chance, A)	Golden Scene Co	$34,217	1	6	$5,703		$34,217

Good hold for Life of Pi. Good start for My Sassy Hubby. Cold War just missed being the first film in a while to drop less than 50% for 4 straight weeks. Exceptional total, however, and it will pass 5.4m. Back to 1942 opened OK. Code Name Geronimo blew up. Skyfall is dying now that Life of Pi and My Sassy Hubby have taken over. Ruruoni Kenshin, Fierce Wife both had dismal openings. Rise of the Guardians couldn't drop under 50% despite falling less than 50% on Sunday. A Ghost of a Chance put in a decent performance.

	Friday				December 14
Rank	Title	LW (adm.)	TW (adm.)	% chg (adm.)	QD % chg (adm.)
1	The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	--	22,592	--	+22.5%
2	My Sassy Hubby	11,450	8,948	-21.9%	+16.8%
3	Life of Pi	14,703	7,328	-50.2%	+42.5%
4	Back to 1942	4,328	2,448	-43.4%	+31.7%
5	Cold War	6,314	2,290	-63.7%	+38.1%

Hobbit isn't doing so great. I am still a believer that it will do great things this Christmas. It looks like this will start off with 1.5m. Saturday and Sunday should pick up a bit but not too much considering the holidays are just around the corner. Before anyone calls it a flop, please remember that ROTK made only 1.76m from 7 days so it will still gross more in 1 week than ROTK. And it will still beat ROTK's final gross.

My Sassy Hubby had an outstanding hold. Of course, it won't hold as well on Saturday and Sunday but it should be able to get $275,000 this weekend. Life of Pi held OK but its Saturday and Sunday drops will be larger so the drop isn't anything spectacular. Back to 1942 is showing signs of a decent hold. Cold War is almost dead. The 50% drop last week was the beginning of the end for it. It'll still leave theaters with 5.4m, far above what anyone expected from this movie.

	Saturday adm.	(so far)			December 15
Rank	Title	LW	TW	% chg	QD % chg
1	The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	--	16,202	--	+57.2%
2	Twilight: Breaking Dawn 2	--	5,282	--	--
3	Life of Pi	11,416	4,341	-62.0%	+81.6%
4	My Sassy Hubby	3,940	2,310	-41.4%	+34.9%
5	Wreck-It Ralph	--	1,583	--	--

Still not that good for The Hobbit. I expected a huge jump and it didn't materialize. Let's see if it picks up with walk-ins.

Twilight got off to an early start thanks to Saturday night previews. Only 10 PM shows were scheduled throughout the city so this is a pretty nice start. I don't want to say it's outstanding because Twihards love to come out on opening day and then start to disappear afterward. Let's see how much this will help with its opening weekend next week. I think it will get to $900,000 including these previews but I think 1m will be a stretch because it will be fighting for the female demographic with Les Miserables and The Hobbit this year. It had the female demographic to itself last year when Sherlock Holmes/Mission Impossible clogged up the majority of the screens and in 2010 when Eclipse opened against Shrek 4. The only time it faced a movie with a female demographic was Avatar in 2009. Avatar killed everything and New Moon fell from Twilight by $300,000 (1.89m total for New Moon). Twilight has never hit #1 ever in HK and next week will be no different. The Hobbit will beat it; Jack Reacher could do it. To this day, Twilight remains the biggest film of the franchise in HK.

Notice the increasingly bigger drops for Life of Pi this week? Good because The Hobbit is snatching away its weekend screens and as a result, it doesn't have the showings to maintain the business it did last weekend. It is pursuing a $350,000 weekend and a total of 4.6m. My Sassy Hubby has pulled off very strong performances the past few days. Although it slid a harder 41% with pre-sales on Saturday, it is looking at a very strong hold of just -30%.

Wreck-It Ralph also got the special screenings treatment on Saturday. Theaters have given it different showtimes. Some have given it only 1 morning showing while others have given it 5, 6, even 7 showings. While this is only pre-sales for previews, it nearly matched Rise of the Guardians even though it had less showtimes and awareness. It'll stomp all over Rise of the Guardians and crush its total with just its opening weekend.

Les Misérables sneaks begin Dec. 22 and will last until Christmas Eve.

Opening day
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - $255,627

Much lower than what I initially predicted but higher than what its admissions and avg price suggested. It'll make about 1.5m this weekend, which is an acceptable gross for The Hobbit here. It still has a lot of work ahead if it wants to make 10m.

Figures for the holdovers will be posted later.