DESPICABLE ME 3 (Illumination/Universal) will have no trouble holding the lead at the box office over the 5-day July 4th weekend.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have opening day at $28.6M (including $4.1M from Thursday night), which could give it $85M by Sunday and $125M by Tuesday.  That’s still on the low side for the […]

  The holiday box office has turned out to be AQUAMAN (DC/Warners), and then everything else.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have its 3rd Friday at $16.8M, up 15% from Thursday and down 40% from last Friday, for a likely $51M weekend, and $215M by New Year’s Day.  Comparisons to other DC releases at the same […]

> RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES pulled in around $1.25M in its Thursday midnight screenings.  This is better than the $800K that Cowboys & Aliens managed last week, but dwarfed by the $4M Captain America earned and Thor‘s $3.3M.  (Let’s not even talk about Harry Potter.)  This supports Mitch Metcalf’s prediction that Apes […]

> Sony jump-started the release of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO last night with early runs starting at 7PM at its slightly less than 3000 theatres.  Early reports are that it pulled in $1.6M for those showings.  There aren’t a lot of R-rated Tuesday night “preview” comparisons to draw on (OK, there are none), […]

Question #1 on this weekend’s boxoffice:  if The Dark Knight Rises is a blockbuster but everything else Warners releases this summer is a bomb, is the studio having a good summer?  Based on preliminary Friday numbers at Deadline, ROCK OF AGES joins Dark Shadows (and Chernobyl Diaries, too) as a Warner Bros summer flop.  Rock […]

  Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, the boxoffice generally showed an uptick from Thursday, which was at it should be for the last Friday of the year.  (In 2007, the last time Christmas fell on a Tuesday, Friday was generally up 10-25% from the day before.)  Some of the biggest titles, though, remained flat. […]

  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, 2 GUNS (Universal/Emmett-Furla) claimed Friday with $9.8M (including $1.3M from Thursday night).  If that number holds, it’ll be considerably below Denzel Washington’s last action opening for Safe House, which started with $13.6M, despite the presence this time of Mark Wahlberg, although it would be higher than Unstoppable ($8M) and […]

  CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (Disney) is as big as expected, and maybe even a little bigger.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have it at up to $38M on Friday (that includes $10.2M from Thursday night), putting it close to 20% higher than the $31.9M opening day for Thor: The Dark World, which wound up […]