This weekend’s boxoffice is looking stronger than last week’s–but that’s not saying very much.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION (Screen Gems/Sony) owned Friday with $8.8M.  That’s lower than the opening days for the last several Resident Evil installments ($10.7M/$9.6M/$9.2M for the last 3), and should mean a $22M opening weekend […]

  Darren Aronofsky’s NOAH (Paramount) should have no trouble winning the weekend, with preliminary numbers at Deadline giving it around $15M on Friday (that includes $1.6M from Thursday night).  That’s a strong result for a film that doesn’t fit into a conventional Hollywood genre, and normally it would indicate a weekend of $40M or more, […]

  This may be a good time to pause the stories about Disney’s infalliability, and the unstoppable dominance of the Star Wars franchise.  SOLO (Lucasfilm/Disney) is underperforming in a big way, with preliminary numbers at Deadline putting its opening day at $36.5M, extremely frontloaded with $14.1M of that total from Thursday night.  That’s the lowest […]

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 […]

> Deadline‘s preliminary numbers for Friday have JOHN CARTER (Disney) at around $10M for the day, which depending on how much it plays as a family movie on Saturday, should mean a $25-30M weekend.  That’s not a horribly low number–it’s one of the half-dozen highest openings of the year so far–unless you’re trying to earn […]

  There haven’t been a lot of Wednesday openings this summer, and even fewer that are relevant to the start of THE SMURFS 2 (Sony), which began with $5.2M yesterday.  This Is The End ($7.8M) was aimed at a completely different audience, while the colossal $35M start for Despicable Me 2 was part of a […]

  TAKEN 2 (20th), as expected, is running away with the boxoffice this weekend.  Its opening day, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, is at $17.5M, not that much less than the $24.7M the original Taken made in its entire opening weekend in 2009.  The sequel should reach $45M or so for the weekend, although it […]

  THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (Village Roadshow/MGM/Columbia/Sony), an expensive action movie in a month that doesn’t often feature them, and toplining the potent combo of Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, is starting off moderately well but not exceptionally.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have its opening day at $13M (including $1.75M from Thursday night), slightly ahead of […]