All around the world, they still love Michael. Here in North America, they just like him.

Michael Jackson's This Is It, director Kenny Ortega's compilation of rehearsal footage from the London gig that was aborted by the star's death earlier this year, earned $101 million in its first days at the worldwide box office, according to initial estimates by Sony Pictures. That set a global record for a concert film and proved the point of a movie-industry riddle passed along by Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke: "What's the difference between a dead Michael Jackson and a dead cow? The cow can't be milked."

Back home, Jackson is still bad, he's bad -- I mean, he's a reliable generator of concert-film coin -- but he's no Miley Cyrus. Her Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour took in $31.1 million on just 683 screens, for a $45,561 average, in its first three days of domestic release in February 2008. By contrast, This Is It, which opened with midnight shows on Oct. 27, played in nearly 3,500 venues in North America, amassing $32.5 million in its first five days and a solid but unspectacular $21.3 million over the Halloween weekend, for a per-screen average of $6,119. That was well below the pre-release guesses of about $35 million for the three-day weekend.

There are always explanations when a strongly hyped movie underperforms. This was the first year since 1998 that Halloween has fallen on a Saturday, often the week's biggest box-office day. Some fans went trick-or-treating instead of This Is It-ing. Dollars and euros aside for the moment, the movie, which most critics greeted warmly, was a pretty impressive achievement considering that back in the spring, neither Ortega (who was staging the concert) nor the videographers (who were shooting the footage for Jackson's private library) knew they were making a movie. Originally announced as a two-week run, This Is It will keep playing indefinitely.