I thought I’d do the radical thing today and not post anything further because everyone and everything has shut down for the holiday. Tuesday the 4th is a flatliner. I hate days off but you can’t fight City Hall.

Superman Returns took in around $13.9 million yesterday (Monday, 7.3). Apparently the Sunday morning estimates were low because no one considered the bad-weather-around-the-country factor, meaning that Superman‘s Sunday haul was probably closer to $19 rather than $16 million, which translates into a five-day figure more like $87.5 million rather than, say, Box-Office Mojo‘s estimate of $84.7 million.
Add yesterday’s $13.9 million to the $87 million-plus and Superman Returns has now crested $100 million with another $7 or $8 million expected today.
But as I’ve said two or three times over the past week, earnings will be down next weekend (low to mid 20s) when the Pirates hit town, and it’ll basically be a Superman toilet-water-swirl from then on.
Nikki Finke‘s souces are telling her it probably won’t make it to $200 million domestically, but I think it just might. But there’s no fighting the general consensus, which is that Superman “didn’t do well enough…it didn’t do what it needed to,” as a plugged-in journo put it Sunday night.
Bryan Singer, Brandon Routh, Jon Peters, Kevin Spacey and especially lightweight Kate Bosworth didn’t quite do the thing…they stirred and delighted a good portion of the U.S. but there were too many naysayers and thus a good-but-not-great showing.
The best move now for everyone involved (and I’m including Alan Horn) is to grab their dark glasses and fishing hats and get in their cars and drive out to the desert and stay there for a couple of weeks until the Great Superman Letdown has faded from memory and everyone has moved on and begun to obsess about the next tragedy.

Another big gun — Variety‘s Todd McCarthy — has slammed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest for being empty and bloated and too long. He says “there’s not a genuine moment” in either of the two Pirates films, “no point of human contact…they’re baldly concocted, confected, engineered.” (Just as I said in my review that “there’s nothing, nothing, nothing going on inside [Pirates 2]…nothing kicks in within…not ever, not once.”) And he claims the new one “puts the viewer into a bland stupor.” And “why wear out the film’s welcome with a wearisome two-and-a-half-hour running time,” McCarthy wonders, “when a tight-ship 100 minutes would have insured more constant excitement, not to mention giving exhibitors more showtimes per day?”