The U.S Box Office Report Archive

I've started and stopped and deleted this blog about five or so times. I think the problem was that I kept trying to keep it relevant and in this day and age that's a full time job. Movie news sites are a dime-a-dozen and they do a much better job of keeping people up to date than one person with an hour a night to spare, ever could.

The only thing that I have managed to keep doing is my weekly box office report for the RLLMUK forum. I've no idea when I started doing the reports but the first one that resembles how they look today goes back to July 2005. Since then, as far as I can tell, I've turned one in every week, missing only a handful of weekends due to important events, holidays or illness.

Prior to that July 2005 report I tended to copy and paste Yahoo's weekend report which covered only the new releases and those films enjoying (or not) a decent second-frame take. Failing that I'd take their headline and simply add a few words to the figures. I think those type of 'report' date back to the Edge forums, given that I recall an argument I had with Despin over the success of the film '8 Mile'. That film was released in late 2002, a few months before RLLMUK was started (and some time before the forum gained a dedicated Film/TV folder).

I've not idea how many actual reports I've written but I imagine it numbers close to three hundred now, if not more. It was during the forum upgrade that I realised I had no actual record of any of these reports and if the forum had needed to have been started from scratch, I would have lost them all. I should add that while I do have rough draft reports for the last three years, most of them differ in some way from the final published version (usually caused by a film doing better or worse than expected from when I write the first draft on a Saturday evening to when the actual figures are issued on Sunday).

So this blog will actually become less of a blog and more an archive of all the reports I've written in the now standard box office report format. If for nothing else other than to have a record of the many hours I've spent writing and researching, hopefully making an accurate and interesting read in the process. I'll leave the reports just as they were published, other than to tidy up the formatting (though the temptation to correct glaring errors is high).

I've thought about stopping a number of times, especially since the birth of my daughter in 2007 but weird (tragic some would say) as it sounds, the box office report is one of the few things I've been able to stick at. I can't say they'll run for another seven years but who knows.

Thank you to all those who gave and continue to give up their time to read the RLLMUK U.S Box Report each Sunday evening/Monday morning.