What kind of summer movie season has it been, really?  For the past several weeks, business has been consistently up, erasing the losses from a soft spring, and even with 3D, Imax and inflation taken into account, more tickets are being sold.  But this marks the fourth consecutive weekend that an expensive, high-profile summer […]

  OPENINGS:  PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (Paramount) was an experiment in several ways–the first installment of the franchise to be a spin-off and not a direct sequel, the first released out of the Halloween season, and one of Hollywood’s first tries at producing and marketing a movie primarily to the Latino audience.  All of […]

  OPENINGS:  There was more loose change behind the Friday cushions for OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (Disney) than the early estimate had found, and at $24.1M, it seems likely to reach at least $70M for the weekend, sparing Disney some embarrassment.  But opening at the same level as last year’s The Lorax–down 40% from […]

> The weekend multiples this week are a little high for movies that skew to women like Something Borrowed, Jumping the Broom and Water for Elephants due to Mother’s Day, when many families treat mom to a flick. The Thor number looks a little less impressive when you compare it to mid-level comic book movies […]

  THE DARK TOWER (MRC/Columbia/Sony) will probably win the weekend, but in unimpressive fashion.  It had a $7.7M opening day (including $1.8M from Thursday night), putting it on track for a $19M weekend.  The production budget was reportedly kept reasonable in the $60Ms, but Sony gave it an A-level marketing campaign, which will put total […]

  WONDER WOMAN (RatPac/Wanda/Ten Cent/DC/Warners) is proving to be exactly what its studio–and the summer box office in general–needed.  For Warners, it’s giving the embattled DC mega-franchise its first taste of critical praise since the days of The Dark Knight, which is important in itself, and that’s paying off in ticket sales.  Preliminary numbers at […]

  The negligible horror cheapie INCARNATE (High Top/Blumhouse/Universal) is the only new wide opening of the post-Thanksgiving weekend, and with just $800K on Friday according to preliminary numbers at Deadline and a weekend that may not break $2M, even the ultra-low budget Blumhouse division may not be able to find any shred of profit from […]

  2018, as is often the case, is kicking off at the box office, with low-budget horror, and according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, INSIDIOUS: THE LAST KEY (Blumhouse/Universal) easily took Friday with $12.5M (including $2M from Thursday night).  That’s a very solid number, not up to the $16.8M for January 2012’s The Devil Inside, […]