Summer Box Office Analysis

David Poland over at MCN does an incredible job of looking at expectations for the next few weeks of summer movies.

I will say, however, that while I absolutely love his work and this piece, I think he's a bit misguided about the way the press covered Mission: Impossible 3 and its so-called failure at its box office opening.

He's positioning it as the beginning of the press wanting to talk about the "slump" again, when he proves that so far, there's no slump at all (7 straight up weekends compared to last year).  And if Poseidon dies this weekend, then David is absolutely right - the slump stories will explode again.

However, the real reason for the stories this week about M:I-3 is simple:

• Fact: Once-perfect Tom Cruise went bonkers in public. 
• Question: Would that affect his clout at the box office? 

That is the only question that anyone in the press wanted answered this past weekend.  If M:I-3 did well, they all would have written about how his private life didn't affect his movie life.  Instead, it fell about $10-$20 million short of expectations, so they all wrote the opposite.

Anyway, read David's piece.  It's fantastic.