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The recent explosion in price differentiation at the box office is starting to make these columns somewhat more difficult. For example: Clash of the Titans](http://www.cinematical.com/2010/04/01/clash-of-the-titans-review/) set an Easter weekend record, grossing $61.4 million (not including late-night showings Thursday, topping the previous record holder, Scary Movie 4](Scary Movie 4 (2006) - Movie | Moviefone), which opened to $40 million in 2006. Such comparisons have always been a bit misleading, since of course you have to adjust for inflation – $40 million in 2006 comes out to around $43 million today. If your aim is to gauge popularity, that’s not too helpful either, since the increase in movie ticket prices has outpaced inflation. $40 million adjusted to today’s average ticket prices is around $46.5 million. Clash still wins, but it’s not as much of a rout.
But many of the theaters showing Clash of the Titans are showing it in 3-D, which makes things more complicated still. Variety](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118016878.html?categoryid=3764&cs=1&nid=2562&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+variety%2Fheadlines+(Variety+-+Latest+News)) says that the average price of a ticket to a 3-D feature is $14.73 – and that 52% of Clash’s weekend gross came from 3-D showings. Doing a bit of rough number-crunching, adjusting Scary Movie 4’s numbers to a similar 2010 3-D release gives you a weekend number of… around $69 million. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Scary Movie 4 should keep the Easter weekend title – there are a gazillion assumptions built into that calculation, including that people would actually have paid a premium to see Scary Movie 4 in 3-D. But it just goes to show you how dodgy these types of box office comparisons are getting.
More on the weekend’s releases, and the top 10, after the jump.
Continue reading Weekend Box Office: Clash of ‘the Titans’ and Tyler Perry