The most interesting box office story of the weekend is WARCRAFT (Legendary/Universal).  It’s a dud in the US, with $11M on Friday according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, which with its frontloaded fan audience probably means a $25M or so weekend and a domestic total that may not reach $75M.  That’s not much on […]

  Hollywood generally has little interest in opening films against the Super Bowl, and to the extent it participates, it tries to counterprogram the game by aiming at the young female demographic.  Thus we have a PG-13 horror movie and a YA fantasy-romance this weekend, but neither is finding much of an audience. RINGS (Paramount) […]

  By superhero movie standards, SHAZAM (DC/New Line/Warners) was moderately priced, with around $225M in production/marketing costs.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline put its opening day at $20M (including $5.9M from Thursday), and although that’s a cut below comic book blockbusters like Captain Marvel ($61.7M), Spider-Man: Homecoming ($50.8M) or Wonder Woman ($38.2M), it’s solidly in line with […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has early Friday numbers, and they foretell some surprises for the weekend boxoffice.  Chief among them is the remarkable $7-8M that the 3D pre-Blu-Ray reissue of Disney’s THE LION KING grossed on Friday alone, which should mean a weekend of close to $24M, far above expectations.  The combination of nostalgia and […]

> Deadline has preliminary numbers for Friday, and this won’t be one of those weekends where the winner is unclear up to the wire.  ACT OF VALOR (Relativity), the low-budget (but highly marketed) Navy SEAL recruitment vehicle/action movie swept the day with over $9M, about 50% ahead of anything else.  The only question now is […]

    The midweek boxoffice path of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES has been oddly up and down.  Compared to the trajectory of The Dark Knight, it’s had a worse Monday, a better Tuesday, a worse Wednesday, and now a better Thursday, as Rises took in an additional $13.2M yesterday for a 7-day total of $225M.  Rises […]

  PAIN & GAIN (Paramount) may take the last weekend before the summer movie season starts, but based on the preliminary numbers at Deadline, it’s not going to win very impressively, with a $7M Thursday night/Friday that should give it a $17-19M weekend, right where Mitch Metcalf’s weekend predictions had put it.  Pain was shot on […]

  THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, the 600-pound gorilla of the holiday movie box office season (The Hobbit 2 is by comparison a smaller simian, at least in the US) opens tonight, and the question is just how big it will be.  The first Hunger Games opened in March 2012 and had the 6th biggest […]