“Pearl”‘s a gem with $75 million

Disney estimated Monday that Pearl Harbor earned $75.1 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, short of some analysts’ expectations but nevertheless above the grosses of every other Memorial Day opener in history except for 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which earned $90.2 million. Referring to analysts’ forecasts last week that the film would earn $100 million, the Los Angeles Times commented Tuesday that the movie was “somewhat a victim of its own media hype,” while The Associated Press said that Disney was working to “defuse reports of the film falling short of expectations.” Producer Jerry Bruckheimer implied that the $100-million figure was inspired by his rivals. “The competition always tries to raise the expectations of the press, so that when the numbers come in, all you can do is fail,” he told the New York Post. But an unnamed executive at one of the rival studios told the New York Daily News, “The expectations out there were set so high, they were never going to hit those numbers.” Disney maintained that given the film’s 183-minute length, it would have been “mathematically impossible” for Pearl Harbor to have earned $100 million. And Exhibitor Relations chief Paul Dergarabedian observed during an interview with AP: “No other three-hour movie has done this well [on] its opening weekend.”