OPENINGS:  Even in a normal box office marketplace, a mild rom-com with no big-name stars like THE BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY (TriStar/Sony) probably wouldn’t have made much money, and it has both a low production budget and limited marketing costs going for it.  All that being said, though, there’s nothing about a $1.1M weekend at […]

  OPENINGS:  The hugely-anticipated US opening box office numbers for TENET (Warners) turned out to be frustratingly opaque to interpret, and to the extent they were comprehensible, simply not very good.  (Let’s assume it was coincidental and not meta that some are saying the same about the film itself.)  Warners issued a grand total of […]

  OPENINGS:  THE NEW MUTANTS (20th/TSG/Disney) was DOA long before the world was engulfed by a pandemic, repeatedly postponed as first 20th and then Disney tried to figure out what to do with it.  The only reason it’s having a theatrical release at all is that 20th’s pre-Disney co-financier TSG had the contractual right to […]

  What are we to make of the first meaningful box office numbers to come our way since March?  The area is a landscape of spin in the best of times, and these of course are not those.  Other than drive-ins, heatres remain closed in several major US markets (including both NY and LA), and […]

The weekly Year to Date Box Office Report & Worldwide Studio Scorecard will return when North American theaters reopen and studios resume wide releases. Coverage of broadcast and cable television ratings will continue as normal. ###

  This was the weekend that the COVID-19 crisis hit the box office in earnest, and while that fact pales in importance compared to the human cost of the pandemic, it’s going to represent a multi-billion dollar hit that will reverberate through the lives of many throughout the world.  As bad as the numbers below […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2020 film slates by studios (films entering wide release in the 2020 calendar year). BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2020 is now -9% below last year’s comparable span (another 7 points worse than last week) and -21% below this point averaged over […]

  OPENINGS:  In the US, ONWARD (Pixar/Disney) was merely a disappointment by Pixar standards, with an OK 37% Saturday bump that allowed it to claim a $40M weekend, pending actuals on Monday.  That isn’t much better then the $34.7M launch for last year’s Lego Movie 2, and it’s far off last March’s $55M for How […]