There’s going to be a crowd at the top of the box office this weekend, but there’s not much good news in it for anyone.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, AMERICAN MADE (Cross Creek/Universal) took Friday with $6M (almost $1M of it from Thursday night), which should give it a $15-16M weekend.  However, […]

> 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 […]

  22 JUMP STREET (Sony/Columbia) is having the start merited by a sequel to a huge hit that’s getting ecstatic reviews in its own right.  Based on preliminary numbers at Dateline and elsewhere, it had a $23-24M opening day (that includes $5.5M from Thursday night).  That’s considerably better than the $19.6M start for Neighbors, which […]

  Despite the addition of 3D and IMAX screens with their increased ticket prices, the opening day result for INSURGENT (Summit/Lionsgate) was below the start for last year’s Divergent, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, with $21M compared to $22.8M.  That may mean a $48M opening weekend, below Divergent‘s $54.6M–or even less if, like most […]