OPENINGS:  PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES (Disney) easily took the weekend worldwide, but it’s another diminishing franchise.  In the US, it had a $62.2M 3-day opening, and although Memorial Day will push that to around $76M, on a 3-day-to-3-day basis, it’s down 30% from 2011’s On Stranger Tides (it’s likely […]

  CRAZY RICH ASIANS (SK Global/Warners) has become a genuine phenomenon, down per preliminary numbers at Deadline just 17% from last Friday to $5.8M.  Sunday will be stronger than usual due to the 4-day weekend, so that should mean $23M by Sunday and $28M with Monday, putting Crazy on a track that now seems capable […]

  OPENINGS:  Taking the spotlight from higher-profile arrivals, the anime title MY HERO ACADEMIA: WORLD HEROES’ MISSION (Funimation) was the weekend’s highest-grossing newcomer with $6.4M, better than the $5.9M opening for the last Academia movie, 2019’s Heroes Rising.  These films tend to be fairly front-loaded, but Mission should pass $15M in the US, and it […]

  OPENINGS:  A variety of studios threw product at the Labor Day weekend wall.  None of them broke through, but REAGAN (ShowbizDirect) zeroed in on its target audience–reportedly nearly 2/3 of the audience was over 55 years old, and 3/4 were white–for $7.4M over the 3-day weekend ($9.2M with Monday).  Although films appealing to older […]

  Labor Day weekend is always the exhausted last gasp of the summer movie season, but this year the studios didn’t even try.  Partly it’s the effect of August having generally been a disaster in 2015 (last year’s 4-day Labor Day span featured a $22.9M 5th weekend for Guardians of the Galaxy and $15.6M from […]

  OPENINGS:  For ROGUE ONE (Lucasfilm/Disney), massive success was taken for granted, and the question was how big a standalone spin-off entry in the Star Wars canon could be.  The answer is pretty damn big:  its $155M US opening weekend is the 12th highest ever, and #3 for the year (behind $179.1M for Captain America: […]

  OPENINGS:  STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (Lucasfilm/Disney) had an excellent Saturday for a blockbuster of its size, dropping 39% from Friday, where The Force Awakens had fallen 43%.  That cemented Last Jedi as the 2nd-highest opening in US history at $220M (down 11% from Force Awakens)–and that studio estimate may even be a tad […]

  The holiday box office has turned out to be AQUAMAN (DC/Warners), and then everything else.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have its 3rd Friday at $16.8M, up 15% from Thursday and down 40% from last Friday, for a likely $51M weekend, and $215M by New Year’s Day.  Comparisons to other DC releases at the same […]