For the third time in four weeks the record for the highestopening weekend for a film released in 2004 has been broken, this time thanksto 20th Century Fox's The Day AfterTomorrow. The film took a massive A$6,664,837 from 402 screens and showed ascreen average of A$16,579.

But there was only about 2,000 tickets separating it and Troy, which took A$6,641,426 from 16additional screens from when it was released two weeks earlier. It's screenaverage was A$15,888. In retrospect these two films make Van Helsing's A$4,596,027 from 338 screens (screen averageA$13,597) seem not so impressive but three weeks ago it was enough to break therecord for the year. It is worth bearing in mind that Troy and Van Helsing werehelped by the presence of Australian stars.

These three films, which are ranked first, second and third,together took nearly A$10,000 of the nearly A$12,000 combined gross of all thetop 20 films in the chart. It doesn't leave much room for the rest. In fact,the only other film to do over A$200,000 was UIP's Twisted, which is only in its second week on release.

In what is a very appropriate piece of counter-programming,Dendy's documentary Super Size Me, inanother week of previews, took A$143,895 from only 23 screens. It was curiousto see Icon's Monster pop back in thechart after a two-week absence.