The odds are strong that on Sunday morning, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (Paramount) will claim a $100M weekend, the first of 2014–but we won’t really know until Monday whether the movie has hit that mark.  According to reports at Deadline and elsewhere, Transformers 4 fell sharply on Saturday from its $41.6M opening day, in the […]

  Movie ticket sales were down significantly on December 31, as audiences found other things to do with their New Year’s Eves, but the results still gave Les Miserables a symbolic turnaround, putting it back in 2d place after a weekend behind Django Unchained.  Business should zoom today for the holiday finale, before settling into mundane […]

  The real world, in the form of terrible reviews and dim word of mouth, caught up with BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (DC/RatPac/Warners) on Friday.  Actually, the signs had been there since midweek, although Warners and its box office pets had obscured the fact for a few days by comparing the daily results […]

  As usual, Thanksgiving Day itself was down for many films.  However, that didn’t keep the holiday’s pair of blockbusters from rewriting the record books. THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) set a new Thanksgiving Day record with $14.9M, tearing past the $13.1M set by Toy Story 2.  With the meat of the holiday weekend […]

  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 […]

  OUIJA (Universal) had about the same hold on Saturday as Annabelle did 3 weeks ago, down 9% (in this case to $7.5M), according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, and that should be enough to get it to $20M for the weekend, easily enough for the win against little fresh competition. Ouija isn’t close to […]

> As is traditionally the case, movie boxoffice declined sharply on December 24, the lowest ebb of the holiday period.  According to Deadline, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL (Paramount) remains #1, with $5.6M on Saturday, a 40+% fall from Friday.  Similarly, SHERLOCK HOLMES:  A GAME OF SHADOWS (Warners) fell around 45% to $3.8M on Saturday.  […]

  The underperforming spectacle of the week is INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (20th), which found out that not all that many people cared to see a sequel to a two-decade old hit without its original star.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, opening day was $17.5M (including $4M from Thursday evening), 33% below the already not-great […]