Then: Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — a very big hit by any standard, let alone for a foreign-language film — opened on 16 screens on 12.8.00, and earned $758.542 after four days. Now: Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth opened on 12.29 on 17 screens and has earned $779,427, averaging $44,148 per screen.

The expectation is that Pan’s will have its first million in the coffee can by the end of today, or certainly by sometime tomorrow. Congrats to Picturehouse’s Bob Berney, but what are readers deducing from these figures? The deep-forest fantasy drama opens in…well, it’s already opened in L.A. but Chicago and maybe somewhere else on Friday. It will expand to roughly 100 screens by 1.12.