With summer blockbuster season just days away, none of the studios brought their A game this weekend.  KEANU (New Line/Warners) isn’t going to do for Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele what Trainwreck did for Comedy Central colleague Amy Schumer:  Trainwreck earned $10.7M on its opening day, and based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, Keanu […]

  Half a dozen films entered wide release over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, and none of them is likely to chart higher than 5th place, most ranging from major disappointments to outright disasters. The most unpleasant surprise may be PATRIOTS DAY (CBS/Lionsgate), a piece of populist history with Mark Wahlberg in the lead […]

  All this summer’s box office needed for burial was a shovel, and Hollywood provided that with a Labor Day line-up devoid of any genuinely wide new releases.  The result is going to be ugly, except for a few hardy holdovers. The widest release of the weekend isn’t new at all:  it’s the one-week 901-theatre […]

  There’s usually a box office hangover after a holiday weekend opening, but the Friday-to-Friday drop for SOLO (Lucasfilm/Disney) was particularly sour, down 77% to $8M in preliminary numbers at Deadline, compared to the 73% for last year’s Pirates of the Caribbean V, and 74% for X-Men: Days of Future Past.  In fact, it was […]

  The other studios didn’t try very hard to compete with the second weekend of CAPTAIN MARVEL (Marvel/Disney), and the blockbuster will have no trouble repeating as #1 this week.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, the Friday-to-Friday drop was 70% (to $18.8M), which sounds like a lot, but is fairly standard for the genre.  […]

> Full weekend drops can be expected to hit a little harder than usual this week, because last week’s holiday weekend boosted Sunday receipts. TRANSFORMERS 3 had a second Friday about midway between those of its two predecessors ($14.9M compared to $10.8M and $18M, respectively), with a decline that was slightly worse than, but in […]

> Navy SEALs shoot up the Friday boxoffice. OPENINGS:  The very aggressive marketing for ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) made it seem like it was a patriotic duty to see the film, and successfully hid the fact that it’s mostly a sub-par B action movie.  The question now is whether its quality will catch up with […]

  The bloodshed in this weekend’s new arrivals extended to the movies themselves. OPENINGS:  KILLING THEM SOFTLY (Weinstein), with a $2.5M Friday, may become Brad Pitt’s lowest opening live-action wide release ever at around $7M, and it won’t be helped going forward by a shockingly bad exit poll grade of F from opening night audiences.  This […]