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The other two openers from the weekend, Surf's Up and Hostel: Part II, finished in fourth and sixth place with $1,856,465 and $911,704 respectively. I'm holding off on the comparison films for another day, but suffice it to say that Surf's Up's performance is less than I had expected while Hostel: Part II is going to pull a vanishing act at the box office. We discussed the difficulties of horror sequels outside the Saw franchise in the past couple of years, and the trend certainly has continued here. I don't even expect to waste much time discussing Hostel: Part II the rest of this week. The focus will be on Ocean's Thirteen and Surf's Up while we await the release of the next big release, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

A long look at the top ten yesterday reveals that we are finally starting to see the beginning of true summer box office. Whereas only three films earned over a million dollars last week (Mr. Brooks falling $14,000 short), five did yesterday. Before you think that we have a stronger top five overall, however, grab your calculator and add up the numbers. Last Monday's top five accrued $12,956,185 as opposed to yesterday only accumulating $12,505,230.

So, if the top five was down $450,000, why was the top ten up 6.5%? The answer obviously lies in the bottom half of the top ten. Yesterday's titles earned a whopping $2,167,341 compared to last Monday's pathetically meager $826,373. That's an increase of 162%. So dramatic was the difference that the film that finished in ninth place yesterday would have been in seventh place last weekend and within striking distance of sixth place. The key is that we had three new releases last weekend and while one of them, Hostel: Part II, was an unexpected bomb, its $911,000 still puts it in the same range as last Monday's fourth place finisher, Mr. Brooks, which earned $986,000. So, we have Knocked Up holding up well and we added Ocean's Thirteen, Surf's Up, and Hostel: Part II.

The depth of the top ten improves each time we have a slew of new releases such as this, and that trend will continue on Friday when two solid new openers hit the marketplace plus the prophetically titled DOA: Dead Or Alive (whose tracking indicates it's quite dead) and the instantly forgettable Fido. The downside of having three juggernaut titles in May was that only five other releases given 1,000 or more venues were scheduled for the month and over half of those (Lucky You, Bug and Delta Farce) were complete disasters in terms of box office (and movie taste). That left only 28 Weeks Later and the studio abandoned Georgia Rule carrying the load, thereby allowing indie sleepers Waitress and, more recently, Once to grab some headlines with their surprisingly strong performances relative to expectations - and the current slate of studio distributed releases. When the Fantastic Four sequel and Nancy Drew arrive for the weekend, all of the top ten next week should earn $200,000 or more, a dramatic improvement from recent weeks.

Tomorrow's discussion will focus upon comparison films for Surf's Up and Ocean's Thirteen. I'm not going to give anything away for now, but I will say that coming up with models for these two films, particularly the Clooney one, has not been easy. Neither one will be as directly comparable as Knocked Up's group was.

Daily Box Office for Monday, June 11, 2007
Rank	Film	Distributor	Daily Gross	Weekly Change	Running Total
1	Ocean's Thirteen	Warner Bros.	$4,155,375	New	$40,288,778
2	Knocked Up	Universal	$2,689,065	- 39.4%	$68,556,085
3	Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End	Walt Disney Pictures	$2,169,213	- 47.7%	$255,610,936
4	Surf's Up	Sony/Columbia	$1,856,465	New	$19,496,714
5	Shrek the Third	DreamWorks	$1,635,112	- 37.7%	$283,095,177
6	Hostel: Part II	Lionsgate	$911,704	New	$9,115,095
7	Mr. Brooks	MGM	$515,102	- 47.8%	$19,108,722
8	Spider-Man 3	Sony/Columbia	$470,042	- 38.0%	$326,055,191
9	Waitress	Fox Searchlight	$190,493	- 14.5%	$12,157,542
10	Gracie	Picturehouse	$80,000	- 44.8%	$2,533,515
Box office data supplied by Exhibitor Relations

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