Seems to me you’re getting caught up in a misunderstanding between “news” and actual business.
First of all, recall that, as we’ve discussed here a couple of times, the studio’s box-office revenue drops over the course of a film’s theatrical run on a sliding scale, with the exhibitor taking a larger cut in each succeeding week, so it makes some sense to pay more attention to the first couple of weekends than to the long-term run. Based on the way the revenue sharing changes, trying to pin a vague term like “popularity” to a movie is in the interest of neither the studio (distributor) or cinema owner (exhibitor). It’s all about profitability; nothing else is worth tracking.
Further, and perhaps more importantly for this discussion box office performance is immediate. On Sunday night, the studios can release estimated weekend performance of their films to a grateful news media hungry for any content they can use to fill up a minute or two on the endless treadmills of their newscasts. This opening-weekend performance is important for estimating a movie’s ultimate profitability, as noted above, and there are volumes and volumes of actuarial-style formulas and statistics to extrapolate probable performance from the first three or five days (which includes an increase or decrease from Friday to Sunday, as an early barometer of word-of-mouth), but it’s hardly the only measure used by the studios.
However, again, it is the immediate one and thus it gets the big play for the public. A movie’s long-term profitability (“popularity,” again, is too ambiguous a term to warrant much currency in the CPAs’ logbooks), as discussed already in the thread, has much more to do with video sales, cable and broadcast premieres and repeats, ancillary revenue (video games, t-shirts, etc.), and the like, than simply the opening weekend, but that sort of stuff is too boring, complicated, and drawn out to make the news. Really, think about why CNN would want to include an item like this: “As of Tuesday, April 24, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld is now in the black. The film’s production cost of $184M and marketing outlay of $58M <note: all figures hypothetical> were offset by initial box-office earnings of $62.3M over its eleven-week run, and $49.8M in home-video sales, for a net loss after twelve months of $121M. This shortfall has since been made up by continued home-video performance, including an eight-year rental volume that earned $47M for the studio, and broadcast repeats in 1998, 1999, and 2001…” and so on, and so on, and so on. Who really cares, except the actual movie house?
Besides, studios really don’t want it publicly known when a movie enters into the black, because they’ve developed complicated accounting processes that conceal a film’s true earnings over the long term. As of a year and a half ago, the global blockbuster Men in Black was still being reported as being in the red by its studio, based on mind-numbing algorithms about Brazilian advertising and Asian distribution networks and amortized intra-organizational chargebacks and all sorts of other silliness. They’re much happier if the general population focuses on the weekend box office, even though it provides an incomplete picture, because it lets them conduct their actual business in relative secrecy.
So, in summation, I’d say that while the original question isn’t exactly meaningless, it does depend on misconceptions about the Hollywood business model that are understandable based on the public face offered by the industry. DVD sales are very important and will continue to get more important, but trying to make a news story out of a movie’s “popularity” is next to impossible, so you won’t see it discussed. Don’t conclude from that, however, that measures of profitability are limited only to what’s mentioned on Fox News Entertainment Minute.
The fact that Pirates of the Carribean and Finding Nemo made a mint in DVD sales the last few weeks isn’t all that interesting, because everyone already knows PoC and FN made a mint in theaters last summer.