Posted on: Wednesday, September 5, 2001

Who can guess which summer films will score?

USA Today

"Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Planet of the Apes" were two of the biggest movies of the summer, while "crazy/beautiful" and "Rat Race" were also-rans, according to their opening weekend and final box office tallies.

Box office watchers gauge what audiences are saying about movies by how much (or how little) the box office drops between the first and second weekends. By that measure, which indicates "word of mouth," Lara and the apes look like losers, and teen love story "crazy/beautiful" and slapstick comedy "Rat Race" are the crowd-pleasers.

"People who did get a chance to see "Rat Race "and "crazy/beautiful" "thought they were pretty good," Marks says, citing the films' relatively modest drops.

Apologists for the fast flame-outs argue that movies such as "Croft" and "Apes" opened so well and so widely that there simply was little audience left to see them.

But that doesn't explain why "Shrek" had staying power, bucking the burnout pattern by increasing its performance in its second weekend and staying strong all summer. Other films, such as the recently released ghost story "The Others," may have opened in fewer theaters but are showing more strength than more highly hyped movies did.

On the other end of the spectrum, the computer-animated "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," the Jesse James western "American Outlaws" and the Martin Lawrence-Danny DeVito comedy "What's the Worst That Could Happen" went from bad to worse.