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WEDNESDAY BOX OFFICE: “Smurfs 2” Starts With $5.2M

Posted August 1, 2013 by Mitch Salem

  There haven’t been a lot of Wednesday openings this summer, and even fewer that are relevant to the start of THE SMURFS 2 (Sony), which began with $5.2M yesterday.  This Is The End ($7.8M) was aimed at a completely different audience, while the colossal $35M start for Despicable Me 2 was part of a […]

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EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: “Divergent” and “Muppets” Underperform; “God’s Not Dead” A Sleeper

Posted March 22, 2014 by Mitch Salem

  It’s clear, based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, that DIVERGENT (Summit/Lionsgate) isn’t going to reach prerelease hopes of an opening in line with the $69M of the original Twilight, much less that movie’s sequels or The Hunger Games.  The question is how low it will go.  Divergent had around $22M on Friday (which includes […]

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EARLY WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: “Dumb and Dumber To” Outsmarts “Big Hero 6″”

Posted November 15, 2014 by Mitch Salem

  Belying its title, DUMB AND DUMBER TO (Red Granite/Universal) picked a strategically smart weekend to debut, facing very little fresh competition (because of last weekend’s Big Hero 6/Interstellar double bill and next week’s The Hunger Games installment) and even less comedy.  The result was a strong $13.9M Friday (including $1.6M from Thursday night) according […]

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EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: Hollywood Takes The Holiday Off

Posted September 5, 2015 by Mitch Salem

  Labor Day weekend is always the exhausted last gasp of the summer movie season, but this year the studios didn’t even try.  Partly it’s the effect of August having generally been a disaster in 2015 (last year’s 4-day Labor Day span featured a $22.9M 5th weekend for Guardians of the Galaxy and $15.6M from […]

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EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: “X-Men: Apocalypse” Underwhelms, “Alice 2″” Flops

Posted May 28, 2016 by Mitch Salem

  Franchises are the lifeblood of Hollywood, so it has to chill studios to see three of those entries falter in a single 2-weekend period, especially since the stakes are higher for this week’s arrivals than last week’s Neighbors 2. Based on the preliminary $27M Friday number at Deadline, X-MEN: APOCALYPSE (TSG/20th) is running almost […]

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EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: MLK Weekend Goes Splat For “Patriots Day,” “Live By Night,” “Monster Trucks” and More

Posted January 14, 2017 by Mitch Salem

  Half a dozen films entered wide release over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, and none of them is likely to chart higher than 5th place, most ranging from major disappointments to outright disasters. The most unpleasant surprise may be PATRIOTS DAY (CBS/Lionsgate), a piece of populist history with Mark Wahlberg in the lead […]

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EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: The End of Summer

Posted September 2, 2017 by Mitch Salem

  All this summer’s box office needed for burial was a shovel, and Hollywood provided that with a Labor Day line-up devoid of any genuinely wide new releases.  The result is going to be ugly, except for a few hardy holdovers. The widest release of the weekend isn’t new at all:  it’s the one-week 901-theatre […]

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EARLY FRIDAY BOX OFFICE: “Ocean’s 8″” Solid, “Hereditary” Mildly Shivery, “Hotel Artemis” Condemned

Posted June 9, 2018 by Mitch Salem

  OCEAN’S EIGHT (Village Roadshow/Warners) wasn’t expected to be a blockbuster, and its reported production budget of $70M was in keeping with that, although the A-level Warners marketing campaign will raise the price.  It’s performing at the high end of expectations with a $15.9M Friday (including $4M from Thursday night) according to preliminary numbers at […]

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