The last time Halloween fell on a Saturday, in 2009, Hollywood mostly stayed away.  (The concert movie This Is It opened the previous Wednesday.)  This year, two studios tried to counterprogram the holiday with problematic star vehicles, and based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, the results weren’t pretty. BURNT (Weinstein) has been conspicuous for […]

  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 […]

> The absence of last weekend’s Good Friday holiday is sending week vs. week comparisons downward, but according to Deadline, even with no holiday this time around, THE HUNGER GAMES (Lionsgate/Summit) is headed for its 4th straight weekend win, with a $6.5M Friday that should lead to a $20M weekend.  This ties The Dark Knight […]

  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have the remake of EVIL DEAD (TriStar/Sony/FilmDistrict) on track for a solid weekend win, with $11.5M on Thursday night/Friday and a probable front-loaded weekend in the mid $20Ms.  That would put it midway between the January horror launches of Texas Chainsaw Massacre ($21.7M) and Mama ($28.4M), and it’ll probably end […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  THE MUMMY (Perfect World/Universal) is a disaster, although the studio and its minions will try to spin otherwise through the course of the weekend.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, it earned $12M on opening day ($2.7M of it from Thursday night), which puts it in line for a $30M weekend and a US […]

  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. […]