Thursday openings are hard to gauge, because there aren’t very many of them, and most of them are designed to extend long holiday weekends.  Here’s what we do know about the $10.5M opening day for GI JOE: RETALIATION (Paramount/MGM).  That number includes $2.2M for Wednesday night and Thursday midnight screenings, and without those, it’s […]

  RIO 2 (20th) has leaped out to a Friday lead, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, one that it should be able to sustain for the weekend.  The Rio sequel has $11.5M on Friday, about 10% ahead of the first Rio‘s $10.3M opening day.  That film made $39.2M for the weekend, and Rio 2 […]

  MINIONS (Illumination/Universal) was expected to enfold the weekend box office in its little yellow fingers, and so it is.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline give it a $45M opening day, which appears to be the largest opening in the history of movie animation (the asterisk is because we now consider “Friday” to include Thursday night, […]

  GODS OF EGYPT (Summit/Lionsgate) has been sitting around for so long that Gerard Butler managed to make next week’s London Has Fallen in the interim, and its own studio has been bleating about how the downside had been limited through tax rebates and foreign pre-sales, so the ensuing thudding flop isn’t much of a […]

  After AVENGERS: ENDGAME (Marvel/Disney) torched the record books last weekend, the remaining question was whether it would have the stamina to challenge the biggest records of them all, The Force Awakens in the US ($936.7M) and Avatar worldwide ($2.79B).  It’s not clear after Friday whether this weekend will answer that in a definitive way.  […]

> 1:45AM UPDATE:  Deadline has updated its numbers, and the news keeps getting worse for THE THREE MUSKETEERS:  it now appears that the film won’t even get to $3M for Friday, meaning a dreadful $8M or so for this $90M budgeted bust.Most holdovers are doing very well, with FOOTLOOSE, DOLPHIN TALE, MONEYBALL, REAL STEEL, IDES […]

  THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE (Rovio/Sony) is keeping the momentum going at the early summer box office, with a preliminary Friday, per Deadline, at $11M.  That’s almost exactly the same opening day as Sony’s Hotel Transylvania, which had a $42.5M weekend and ended up at $148.3M in the US and another $210.1M overseas.  It’s too […]

  This weekend, Denzel Washington is proving himself yet again one of the last truly reliable movie stars.  Just a week after Liam Neeson flopped with A Walk Among the Tombstones, preliminary numbers at Deadline have THE EQUALIZER (Columbia/Sony) at $12.5-13M on Friday (including $1.5M from Thursday night)–roughly the same amount ($12.7M) Tombstones made in […]