Before Midnight Scores in Limited Debut

This Memorial Day Weekend, the big story will clearly be how Fast & Furious Whatever Number cleaned up shop at the box office.  The bigger story if you read deep enough is the impressive limited debut of Richard Linklater's third entry to his improbable but joyous Before-trilogy.  Starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reprising their roles as lovelorn articulates Celine and Jesse, Before Midnight opened to rapturous reviews (the best in the series) and to splendid early numbers on five screens in Los Angeles, New York and Austin this holiday weekend.  It resulted in the best opening per-screen average for the series.  Before Midnight opened to be a tuneful $274,000 over the three day weekend, netting a per-screen average of $54,800-- the third best opening per-screen average of 2012 (just behind Spring Breakers, which opened in less screens, and The Place Beyond the Pines, which had the Ryan Gosling cool effect going on.)  To put this in perspective, Before Sunset, the last film opened nine years ago to $219,425 on 20 screens for a per-screen average of $10,971 on its way to an eventual box office take of $5.8 million.  Before Sunrise, the first chapter opened in January of 1995 to little fanfare with $1.4 million on its first weekend (on 363 screens) on its way to a $5.5 domestic take.  This may well be the lowest grossing franchise in American film history, but ironically it's also one of the best.  The early numbers for Midnight indicate what over the past eighteen years that the fanbase has thankfully grown.  Now it's time for awards bodies to sternly take notice...