Although some films have opened well against the Super Bowl, both counterprogramming (the Hannah Montana concert movie and Dear John) and playing toward the action genre (Taken and Chronicle), as a rule the studios stay away, and that was the case this year.  The only wide opening was the low-budget horror flick WINCHESTER (CBS/Lionsgate), […]

> The news didn’t get any better for Hollywood on Saturday.  In fact, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, the downhill ride got steeper for SHERLOCK HOLMES:  GAME OF SHADOWS.  The film had virtually no increase from Friday to Saturday, and if those numbers hold, its full weekend tally will probably be around $40M, below […]

  Everything went up at the New Year’s Day box office (bringing to an end the holiday bounty), but to wildly varying degrees.  Business should fall today and rise tomorrow and Saturday, but not to a point equal to New Year’s, with weekend totals for holdovers a bit more than double their numbers from yesterday. […]

  Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline and elsewhere, MALEFICENT (Disney) gained just 6% on Saturday from its Friday start, not a great bump for a family movie, giving it around $25.5M on Saturday and a weekend that now looks like it won’t quite reach $70M, more like $67M.  It’s behaving like Alice In Wonderland (up […]

> Deadline has early Saturday and weekend estimates, but they don’t clarify much.  As of right now, the claim is that COWBOYS AND ALIENS is at $26.2M for Friday/Saturday, with THE SMURFS at $25.9M.  If those numbers hold, logic would say that Smurfs should have the upper hand with its family Sunday matinee audience, but […]

  Veterans Day isn’t considered one of the major Hollywood holidays, but this year it provided some 3-day weekends that boosted Friday numbers (although that may catch up with some totals over the weekend and when next week is compared to it). The other note for the weekend is that all three of the major […]

  THE AVENGERS (Disney) just won’t slow down.  If preliminary numbers at Deadline hold, Avengers made $44.5M on Saturday, up 50% from the prior day and down only 36% from the Saturday of its opening weekend, an extraordinarily good result.  (In comparison, on The Hunger Games‘s 2d weekend, its Saturday was up only 33% from […]

  This weekend is looking like a battle of the family films, with no clear victor at this point.  THE BOSS BABY (DreamWorks Animation/20th) is performing quite a bit better than expected, with preliminary numbers at Deadline giving it nearly $15M on Friday (including $1.5M from Thursday night), which should lead it to a $50M […]