THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART I (Lionsgate) stabilized on Saturday, according to preliminary box office figures at Deadline.  The Day 2 drop was 23%, slightly better than the 25-26% Saturday drops for The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  However, at $42.1M, Mockingjay‘s Saturday was still considerably below the $50.4M/$52.6M of its predecessors, and it’s […]

  THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) will shatter all the December records it was expected to shatter, but based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, its projected $85M weekend is somewhat soft, considering that it had $37.5M on Friday alone.  That’s about a 2.25 weekend multiple, considerably lower than The Avengers (2.57) or Skyfall (2.77) […]

  NO GOOD DEED (Screen Gems/Sony) held better than expected on its 2d day of release and better than Obsessed did in 2009, and that guarantees the Idris Elba/Taraji P. Henson thriller the weekend win.  Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, No Good Deed rose by about 15% on Saturday to $10M, compared to the […]

  OCEAN’S EIGHT (Village Roadshow/Warners) wasn’t expected to be a blockbuster, and its reported production budget of $70M was in keeping with that, although the A-level Warners marketing campaign will raise the price.  It’s performing at the high end of expectations with a $15.9M Friday (including $4M from Thursday night) according to preliminary numbers at […]

  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 […]

  BLACK PANTHER (Marvel/Disney) is, in a word, colossal.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, opening day was $76.6M (including $25.2M from Thursday night), which would make it the #8 opening day of all time, and the highest non-Avengers opening day in Marvel history.  Let’s remember, though, that it’s impossible to tell from opening day […]

  Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed ZERO DARK THIRTY (Sony) is off to a tremendous start in limited release, according to THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER.  The real-life drama about the CIA hunt for Osama bin-Laden, despite (or in part because of) being assailed by, among others, members of the US Senate for its depiction of US torture, was on track […]

> Deadline has the early Saturday and weekend boxoffice estimates, and this is what “frontloaded” looks like:  HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2) plummeted by 52% from Friday (including midnights) to Saturday, with the result that its $44.2M on Saturday didn’t even come close to the Spiderman 3 record of $51.3M for that […]