A guide to the significant happenings at the box office for the week ending Aug. 18, 2005.

Overall Business
Led by Four Brothers and The Skeleton Key, the week totaled $177.1 million, slightly up over last week. Business, though, was down 11 percent from the corresponding week in 2004, when Alien vs. Predator and The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement debuted.

For the year, box office reached $5.7 billion. That's more than nine percent behind 2004, which had $6.3 billion at the same point, and down about 12 percent in terms of number of tickets sold.

Related Charts: Year-to-Date Comparison | 2005 Grosses

Milestones
There wasn't much in the way of milestones this past week, but Wedding Crashers became the 288th movie to top $200 million worldwide. The ribald comedy is a domestic phenomenon with $169.6 million as of Aug. 18, but it hasn't aroused nearly as much interest overseas with $33.8 million thus far.

Related Chart: All Time Worldwide

Bruce Willis in Sin City

End-of-Run
Timed right before its debut on DVD, Miramax/Dimension closed Sin City on Aug. 11. Directors Robert Rodriguez' and Frank Miller's comic book noir extracted $74.1 million from a peak 3,230 theaters, performing at the high end for an overtly stylized genre picture. With a $29.1 million opening weekend, the movie was front-loaded, but it slightly out-grossed each of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill volumes.

Newmarket/Picturehouse stopped tracking The Chumscrubber, even though the picture is scheduled to open in Los Angeles on Aug. 26. The suburban comedy-drama with a name ensemble cast including Jamie Bell, Glenn Close and Ralph Fiennes scrounged up a mere $52,597 in two weeks of limited release.

Date Shifts
Warner Bros. pushed V for Vendetta from Nov. 4 to March 17, 2006, citing post-production delays as the reason. Set in an alternate London, the action thriller is about a masked vigilante trying to overthrow a totalitarian government. Featuring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving, it started production on March 3.

V for Vendetta's move is a bit awkward because the trailer ends with the voiceover, "Remember, remember the fifth of November," which is also the picture's tagline. With its original release date, V would have been in the wake of The Legend of Zorro, bowing with its similarly dressed and weapon-wielding hero on Oct. 28, but would have had the jump on Aeon Flux, another vigilante-versus-totalitarian-government action picture opening on Dec. 2.

Warner Bros. previously had Lucky You, a poker drama starring Eric Bana, set for March 17. Replaced by V for Vendetta, the studio has not specified a new date, listing it for sometime in the first or second quarter of next year.

Related Chart: Release Schedule Changes

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