Steve's Other Job: Monsters, Inc. #1 Film This Weekend, Shatters Records

by , 11:00 AM EST, November 5th, 2001

This weekend was a big weekend for Apple CEO Steve Jobs, but not because of the iPod, iTunes 2, or the trouble with the iTunes 2 Mac OS X installer. Instead, it was his other job as head of Pixar that gathered headlines. Pixar's Monsters, Inc. opened up on Friday and broke a few records in the process. The movie was the #1 movie for the weekend, outpacing it's nearest competitor more than 3:1 in box office receipts. From an E! Online article:

Monsters, Inc. scared up a giant $63.48 million at the box office, according to weekend estimates.

This latest Disney-Pixar computer-generated kiddie flick beat out their Toy Story 2's 1999 opening weekend ($57.3 million) as the top 'toon opening of all time.

The G-rated movie, which stars the voices of John Goodman as a big blue hairy galoot and Billy Crystal as his nifty eyeball of a sidekick, set several other records. It was the best ever November opener and the best ever Disney opener, besting the heavily hyped Pearl Harbor's $59 million first three days in May. It was also the fourth most successful debut of this year and the sixth of all time.

Averaging $19,612 at 3,237 screens, Monsters, Inc. also helped boost the overall weekend box office a mammoth 88.6 percent from last weekend.

The movie was helped out by the addition of the Star Wars Episode II trailer, the first such trailer, which is showing exclusively before Monsters, Inc. That helped draw Star Wars fans in addition to fans of Pixar's animation to the theatres. There is additional information on this weekend's box office results in the full E! Online article.

The Mac Observer Spin:

We all know how important Apple is for Steve Jobs. The man makes US$1 a year in salary (and he has a nice Jet too) to head the world's most innovative and hard-to-run computer company, so he has to like what he's doing. Mr. Jobs has gone on record, however, as saying that his true love is making movies. A great movie lasts forever, or something to that effect, seems to be at the heart of Mr. Jobs' heart. With that in mind, we offer our congratulations for what is likely to be the biggest grossing animated film yet.

Now that we have that out of the way, we thought we'd play with the numbers:

At US$63.48 million in three days, Apple would have to sell 55,248 iMacs (average price US$1149), 24,742 PowerMac G4s (average price US$2565.67), 44,578 iBooks (average price US$1124), 22,412 PowerBooks (average price 2832.33), or 159,097 iPods in order to gross the same amount of money. On the software side, Apple would have to sell 3,181,954 copies of the iDVD 2 upgrade (priced at US$19.95 plus shipping and handling).

During any given three day period, Apple would normally bring in US$44,054,794.52 (average of US$14,684,931.51 per day). That's a bit less than Monsters, Inc., but Apple did that, on average, each and ever day of fiscal 2001. Pixar's year is made in a two month stretch at the box office and about 18 months of merchandising sales, and is almost always downhill from the opening weekend. Still, this should be Pixar's best year ever, and that's officially a Good Thing.

Pixar