Opening Weekend Quotes

They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it.

I think I might be one of the only people in America, or at least the only person I know, who saw both 'The Dark Knight' and 'Mamma Mia!' on their shared opening weekend.

The stakes are high on every film now because there's the opening weekend. The first week is extremely crucial; increasingly, films are being judged in terms of opening day, opening weekend, then first week. People are going berserk promoting their films.

You always worry before your movie opens that no one is going to come out.

Nothing feels worse than knowing that people didn't see your movie. That they wanted to and the critics loved it but nobody knew where it was because it didn't do what it was supposed to do opening weekend. It used to be that independents were allowed to stay in the theaters, build word of mouth.

I wish, to be honest with you, for African American films that we could get a few more theaters. They only open them in 1500 to 2000 for an opening weekend, and how do you expect us to compete. How can we go to certain box office levels if they don't give us more theaters?

When I'm shooting, really the audience I'm thinking the hardest about is that first test screening audience who I want to like the film and that first opening weekend audience.

Now a movie goes out to two, three thousand theaters and by Friday night at 10 o'clock they know if you are in or out. That desperate competition is, I think, horrendous. It's awful.

We went on the opening weekend [of Star Wars], a group of us went out and just popped into a couple theaters just to see people in the theater watching the movie, and it was incredibly gratifying just to see the thing out there being watched by people. And the reaction was more than we could've expected.

I've seen all the Batman movies in the theater opening weekend. I was a big Batman fan, definitely.

I do know my own films don't necessarily work within that high-pressure reductive moment of the opening weekend - or all the ways that many people assess the value of movies.

With female-oriented movies, unless it's something like 'Bridesmaids' or a romantic comedy, you've got to really worry about your opening weekend. And I'm always telling stories about women, not younger women, and it's just a much tougher audience to get to the movie theater.

With features, you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on production and marketing, so everybody's panicked because you literally have an opening weekend to succeed.

There are so many screenwriters with incredible stories to tell, so I hope there will be some kind of shift in the business where very few types of movies are now made by the studios. There needs to be different budgets for different audiences; not everything having to be a huge opening weekend.

Critics should think about how the opening weekend audience might want to discover some surprises for themselves.

Box office is one of the strongest tools we have toward preserving our ability to make our movies. We really can make a difference by purchasing a ticket each opening weekend to a movie made by a woman, even if you don't like the movie or the filmmaker and even if you don't see the film.

It didn't happen every time for every movie. Ruthless People was a good movie, but we didn't get a good release or marketing. They completely blew the opening.

There are films that cost a lot of money that might be decent films. But if they don't perform in that first weekend or two, they're gone.

There are films where the promos reveal all the punches and when you go to watch the film you feel like having seen it all. Such films don't last after a good opening.

A lot of times, we're just sold these movies that are really cynically conceived and marketed, and they just want you there opening weekend, before everybody finds out it's not so good.

I think that the entertainment industry and the entertainment press tends to focus on opening weekend box office as a measure of the success of a film and I think the true success is out there in people's homes and how much they absolutely love these characters.

If Hello' had been my debut film, the numbers would have played out differently.

One of the big moments of my life was watching 'Star Wars' on its opening weekend in Hollywood. I was watching all these people enjoy this film, and I thought: animation can do this.

It doesn't matter how good the movie is. What matters is what it takes during the opening weekend. It's slightly distressing sometimes but that's how it works.

The bigger problem still is that it determines in many ways what movies get made in the first place. Because as sources of finance are considering a project, they ask themselves, "Does this lend itself to a simplistic marketing approach which will guarantee a big opening weekend?" As a movie-goer, I think that's tragic, because when you look back at those movies that made us fall in love with movies in the first place, most of them were not high-concept, and most of them would not have "won their weekend."