Of course, the two release are of different size, so they really can't be measured against one another. The only thing that is useful from a per screen average is to measure the audience intensity. The Undefeated has certainly done well in that regard, especially when one notes the lack of major media promotion behind it.
I used “extremely limited release” to avoid the argument over a “test market” and “limited release”.
I think “limited release” would apply to the movie; “limited release” is also used when they drop a movie in New York and Los Angeles before the Academy awards, for example. I just don’t want to get into that argument.
I don’t know if there is a number of theaters that defines “limited release”, although the term “wide release” is defined as 600 or more theatres. By that definition, I would call “10” an extremely limited release, relative to say the 300 theaters in the limited release of “Atlas Shrugged”.
What they are doing I think is called a “Platform release” — you put out a movie in a few theaters, and then roll it out after it gets good word-of-mouth from the first showings. It is important, for this to work, that the per-theater numbers be big, because they are expected to be larger than those of most general-release movies.
They also like to see a large uptick in the saturday numbers from the friday numbers. For example, the movie “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara” made $222,000 on friday in 88 theatres, for a $2522/screen number. But Saturday they made an additional $598,000, for $6500/screen (I think they added 4 screens) — a 252% increase.
Undefeated had $28,700 friday, and $37,000 saturday, an increase of 29%.
So I don’t know if “The Undefeated” has actually done “well”, if they roll it out to more theaters over the next month then we will know it achieved the desired results. Hopefully the numbers won’t drop off today.