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The news is similarly positive for Live Free Or Die Hard. An estimated Thursday tally of $3.6 million does not quite match Monday's $4.276 million, but the movie managed $18,361,961 throughout the week. This represents 55% of the movie's prior weekend total, a strong result. The news is not all roses and puppy dogs for Live Free Or Die Hard, however; it did have the second largest Wednesday-to-Thursday decline of the top ten. Only Sicko's 42.2% fall is steeper than its 40.3% decline. By the way, in case you are wondering, Ratatouille earned $33,489,910 in four days after starting with $47,027,395 in its first three days. This is a weekend-to-weekday hold-over of 71.2%. Live Free Or Die Hard's hold-over is good; Ratatouille's hold-over is exemplary.

I suppose I should again muster up the courage to talk about the week's other opener, License to Wed. I'm running out of ways to make fun of it already, which is not a good sign for a movie that has been in theaters for only three days thus far. On Thursday, it fell 25.4% to $2,211,461 and has a running total of $7,415,818. Mandy Moore deserves better.

Let's finish up the week's discussion by taking a look at exactly how much the holiday helped the box office bottom line. As I mentioned last Friday, the final week of June's box office was respectable. Despite this, I ended last week's final column by saying the following: "Next week, these numbers are going to seem pitiful, too. The July 4th holiday is going to spike all the weekdays." Was I right? Oh, boy. You could say that. The week day top ten for last week started with $16,050,527. Tuesday's total of $15,248,237 starts the normal trend of weekday to weekday declines. That pattern was briefly disrupted by the debut of Live Free Or Die Hard. Due in large part to that movie's $9,111,638, the top ten had its best day of the week, earning $22,353,083. Thursday saw a 14.6% decline to $19,079,412. Summing up the totals, last week's Monday-to-Thursday had combined top ten box office of $72,731,259, and this was easily the best total for the month. Keep this number in mind for a moment.

This week started with $28,789,748 on Monday. That number jumped dramatically on Tuesday when Transformers had a full day of revenue. July 3rd's top ten had combined revenue of $49,270,000. July 4th, the holiday itself, even smoked that total, earning $57,887,863. Yesterday's total of $39,903,379 gives the four days a grand total of a whopping $175,850,990. This is a number approaching Memorial Day/Thanksgiving totals in terms of overall revenue. It also indicates an increase of over $103 million from last week's weekdays. Even if we take Transformers' $84,934,000 out of the equation, we are still talking about a 25% increase week-to-week. Ladies and gentlemen, this is holiday inflation in a nutshell.

Daily Box Office for Thursday, July 5, 2007
Rank	Film	Distributor	Daily Gross	Daily Change	Weekly Change	Running Total
1	Transformers	DreamWorks	$19,208,000	- 34.0%	N/A	$84,934,000
2	Ratatouille	Walt Disney Pictures	$7,855,873	- 23.0%	N/A	$80,517,305
3	Live Free or Die Hard	Twentieth Century Fox	$3,600,000	- 40.3%	N/A	$66,760,091
4	License to Wed	Warner Bros.	$2,211,461	- 25.4%	N/A	$7,415,818
5	Evan Almighty	Universal	$2,072,520	- 26.9%	N/A	$69,987,650
6	1408	Dimension Films	$1,499,533	- 7.3%	N/A	$46,649,346
7	Knocked Up	Universal	$1,079,595	- 18.9%	N/A	$126,866,745
8	Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer	Twentieth Century Fox	$980,000	- 34.0%	N/A	$119,641,001
9	Ocean's Thirteen	Warner Bros.	$726,359	- 37.1%	N/A	$105,619,950
10	Sicko	Lionsgate, The Weinstein Company	$670,038	- 42.2%	N/A	$7,852,381
Box office data supplied by Exhibitor Relations

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