Date Night did not win last weekend, Titans did when actuals came in

By Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 4/18/10 — How to Train your Dragon drew in a slew of new students in its fourth week, scoring an estimated $20 million over the weekend for a total of $159 million, not too shabby for a film that not much was expected of.

Kick-Ass just didn’t, but came close with a $19.8M opening weekend.

Date Night with Steven Carell and Tina Fey claimed to be No. 1 last weekend with a slim margin over Clash of the Titans, but that proved to be a wet dream when the Titans real numbers came out this week and the gods won.

All the Sunday estimates game may soon change as there will the early semblance of a regulatory body watching over the studios soon.

The trading of boxoffice futures could begin by the third quarter now that federal regulators have granted approval for Media Derivatives to launch its Trend Exchange.

But while TrendEx, as it calls itself, has a right to exist as a designated contract market as of Friday, it still needs approval to specifically trade futures tied to boxoffice receipts.

On Friday, the five members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission voted unanimously to make it happen.

While it easy to say the next Transformers or Spider-Man will be hits, most investors cannot guess by how much and even Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have had films that under-performed. So TrendEx will end up transforming the movie industry by both creating new revenue paths and by disappointing investors that are not savvy to the Hollywood game.