Despite a trio of new entries as competition, BEAUTY & THE BEAST (Disney) wasn’t expected to have any trouble staying in control of its 2d weekend, and it didn’t.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have Friday at $21.2M, down 67% from opening day last week.  That’s only an OK hold, compared to the drops of […]

  THE MEG (Gravity/Warners) appears to be having the opposite box office experience from what we’ve come to associate with US/China action movies.  In the US, it’s overperforming, perhaps helped by a calendar slot a week after Discovery’s yearly Shark Week:  preliminary numbers at Deadline estimate opening day at $16.5M ($4M from Thursday night), which […]

  It’s too soon to tell just how GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS (Legendary/Warners) will fare based on its $19.7M opening day (including $6.3M from Thursday), per preliminary numbers at Deadline.  The reason is that the two previous installments of what Warners calls its “Monsterverse” have had strikingly divergent trajectories at the US box office.  […]

> Oops.  The weekend forecasts were way too high for the sequels Sherlock Holmes 2 and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3.  The holiday season that was supposed to save 2011 (or at least make the year a little less embarrassing) is shaping up to be a major disappointment.  This weekend (when the box office should […]

The 22nd weekend of 2012 is looking like a soft $130 million for the Top 12 films Friday-Sunday, down 15% from this weekend last year.  Snow White and the Huntsman is opening much stronger than forecast (and the weekend overall is consequently not quite the disaster we expected), but this is still the third weekend […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #51 is on pace for a horrifying $98 million.  This weekend of the year is tricky because sometimes it contains Christmas Day itself (such as 2009 when this weekend was December 25-27 and totaled a massive $260 million) and other times it is just a slow warm up to the […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #31 of 2013 looks like a surprisingly weak $124 million for the top 12 films, down 5% from the average for this weekend the past few years (the first such decline since the weekend of June 7-9 eight weeks ago).  Opening at 3,025 theaters Friday, 2 Guns from Universal grossed $10 million Friday […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #11 of 2014 looks like $106 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, almost exactly matching the average for this weekend over the last few years.  Two new wide releases didn’t do anything special, but two limited releases distinguished themselves.   Opening at 3,115 theaters Friday, Need for Speed from Disney grossed $6.6 […]