(source:boxofficemojo.com)

Another weekend, another impressive opening. This time we have The Bourne Ultimatum opening with close $70 million, significantly better than what the last Bourne movie did on it’s opening weekend ($52 million). Of course, as the threequels so thoroughly proved, opening bigger doesn’t mean that the movie will finish up with a bigger total gross than it’s predecessor. Still, $70 million is more than enough to guarantee that the movie will do very well and I’m sure that everyone involved is very happy.

The other weekend openers didn’t do nearly as well. Underdog was underwhelming with $11 million, Hot Rod only mustered $5 million and the $4 million opening of Bratz proved that yes, making a movie based on a doll collection was a very bad idea. I’m a little sad for Hot Rod. Although I haven’t seen the movie myself, it definitely seems like the most interesting one out of the trio, and I was hoping it would attract a few more people. But I guess it will do very well in the DVD if it’s actually any good.

Last weekends champ, The Simpsons, fell hard. In the old days a 66% drop would mean that people thought that the movie was crap. Nowadays it mostly means that pretty much everybody who was interested in the movie went to see it on the first weekend. The Simpsons movie probably won’t reach much beyond the already established Simpsons fan base, by that base is obviously large enough for the movie to be a commercial success.

The Simpsons movie is also doing very well internationally. It earned another $47.3 million this weekend for a foreign cume of $187 million and a worlwide total of $315.5 million. $400 million is well within reach, but it will be interesting to see if it can make it to $500 million.

All of the other holdovers had modest holds, falling between 42% and 48%. The best hold was by Hairspray, but only by a small margin. That movie is well on it’s way to crossing the $100 million mark, but it shouldn’t go much beyond that. Transformers, on the other hand, should reach $300 million this week, and it will keep on trying to reach Spider-Man 3, which is the number one movie of the summer right now with close to $337 million. That mark is probably unreachable tough.