A per-screen average by any other name

By Steven Zeitchik

Box-office gurus love to talk about the importance of per-screen averages for the opening weeks of a limited release -- these numbers are, as they'll happily chirp to you if you ask (or if you don't), they key indicator of a film's reception among early adopters, core audiences, other euphemisms favored by trade reporters.

But not at all strong per-screens are created equal. After all, if you're only in a handful of theaters it makes sense you're going to nab a lot of money the first weekend out: you're playing to the people predisposed to liking the movie, and movies. And since you're playing in a concentrated area, you can blanket that region with marketing in a way that you really can't once the film widens.

The real question is how much those numbers hold as the movie starts to roll to other cities. Because unless your name is "Juno," it's almost impossible to get the per-screen numbers back up after they begin to drop. Like total box-office for studio tentpoles, there's going to be a fall-off each week -- the question is, how much?

There are plenty of theories about the acceptable opening numbers and rates of drop-off. We won't bore you with all of them. Instead we'll bore you with one of them, a golden rule based on specialty hits like "No Country for Old Men" last year: score at least $25,000 per-screen in your first weekend out and don't fall by more than 50% week-to-week anytime in your first month.

So how do this year's limited-releases, now beginning to widen, stack up under this rule?

Here are a few notable limited releases.

* "Rachel Getting Married" -- The Jonathan Demme movie makes the cut, barely. It opened with a very strong $33,000 per-screen, then saw that number fall just under 50% its second week, to $17,000, then by smaller percentages of 41% the next week and 30% the one after that.

* "Milk" -- A gangbusters per-screen opening of $40k per-screen in 36 theaters its first weekend, but then a shade over the magic mark as it fell 57% in this, its second, week.

* "Slumdog Millionaire" -- The big Jamal Malik-style winner by this metric. The movie opened with an impressive $36,000 per-screen (though it should be noted it was only on ten screens, a lot fewer than "Milk"), but still has managed not to lose more than 35% on its per-screen number in any week in its first month of release. In one week it managed to slip less than 10%, a striking figure. And it's doing that even as it rolls out to suburban theaters.

There are still a healthy number of upcoming specialty releases looking to win the fall sweepstakes -- Miramax's "Doubt," Searchlight's "The Wrestler" and The Weinstein Company's "The Reader," to name three. Get in at least half the audience this week that you did last week, and you just might end up holding the winning ticket.

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