Monday's official box office data showed there'd been an unusually high number of wrong estimates of three-day grosses this weekend as viewing of TV football telecasts spiked.
No. 1 finisher "Black Hawk Down" from Sony/Revolution Studios and runner-up "Snow Dogs" from Disney fell short of original estimates by $1.2 million and $500,000, respectively; official data showed that the pics actually took in $17 million and $13.1 million over three days. In those cases, distribs blamed a higher-than-expected impact from Sunday telecasts of pro football playoffs.
"None of us did a very good job in estimating how seriously they would affect us," Disney distrib topper Chuck Viane said.
Yet that would hardly explain why No. 3 finisher "A Walk to Remember," from Warner Bros./Pandora, grossed $1.4 million less than estimated with an official $12.2 million -- unless the nation's teenage girls suddenly turned into armchair quarterbacks. The pic's auds were 84% female and 53% under 18.
WB distrib boss Dan Fellman said the studio had been expecting a big surge in "Walk" patronage by churchgoers after Sunday services. A bestseller-adaptation that boasts a feel-good message of clean living, love and understanding, "Walk" was heavily promoted through Christian church groups.
"We were thrilled in the overall performance of the movie, but we were disappointed in the Sunday gross," Fellman said. "We had expected more of our overall audience to respond to the publicity efforts and meetings that we had with numerous church groups throughout the United States. Frankly, that audience did not show up on Sunday."
The weekend estimate for "Walk" proved wrong by 10%, while "Hawk" fell 7% short and "Dogs" 4%.
Further down the B.O. rankings, Universal/Imagine's "A Beautiful Mind" came within 2% of its earlier estimate with an official $11.5 million in fourth place, and Disney's "The Count of Monte Cristo" fell short by only 1% at $11.4 million in fifth place. But Sony Screen Gems' "The Mothman Prophecies" was off a hefty 5% with an official $11.2 million in sixth place.
Historically, there's been a general tendency by distribs to offer slightly optimistic Sunday estimates of weekend box office performance. But it's been only on rare occasions that more egregious disparities surface when official data is distributed on Monday by B.O. tracker ACNielsen EDI.
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