Spiderman opened with a $114 million weekend gross. It opened on Friday, so that’s three days. I’m going to make some assumptions, feel free to correct them yourself, or point out that I’m an idiot.

So, let’s say that there are five shows a day on average, which makes for fifteen shows per screen over the course of the weekend. Note that this is a generous estimate, since theatres around here are having four showings per day…There were/are 3615 screens showing Spiderman this past weekend, which means there were 54255 showings (assuming the five shows/day average) over the weekend. This works out to $2102 per show. NATO tells us that the average ticket price is $5.65, so this works out to an average of 372 people per showing. I’ve been pretty generous with my estimates here….Feel free to tell me that my assumptions are way off base, but I don’t think that 372 is reasonable to expect for the AVERAGE theatre…

Mind you, when they’re still packing that many people in on Monday night, maybe it’s possible…

I fired up Kazaa (lite) [Warning - popups] this weekend, to see what I could see.

Well, I managed to snag an avi of the Smallville Pilot episode. I had seen it before, but Erin hadn’t, so I thought I’d download it for her. Anyway, I started the download on Saturday, and by Sunday, I had two copies of the pilot - one 250 megs, the other about half that. Of course I selected the 250 meg one, started it up, and hooked the laptop to the TV. Quality was good, but about five minutes in, my jaw dropped. You see one of the characters (Martha Kent) was being played by a different actress than I remembered seeing play her the first time I saw the pilot (on TV.) As it turns out, the 125 meg version has the current actress (Annette O’Toole) while the 250 meg version has a different actress (Cynthia Ettinger) The scenes are exactly the same, just with a different actress. It was pretty weird watching the same show with a different actress playing the same role. Turns out that the 250 meg version was an “unreleased” version of the pilot. I have no idea how it wound up on the filesharing networks.

What’s the moral of this story? Smallville is a good show, and you should check it out if you get a chance. I think Lex Luthor’s character makes the show as entertaining as it is, since he’s a pretty complex guy. The first few episodes that I saw were pretty basic “bad guy of the week” types, but since then they’ve gotten into character development a little more, and I find it’s one of my favorite shows currently.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I don’t use the word ‘hero’ very often, but you sir, are the greatest hero in American history.” - Lionel Hutz