OPENINGS:  THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS (Illumination/Universal) quintupled the next-highest grosser of the weekend, with the biggest opening in US history for an animated non-sequel at $103.2M, easily passing last year’s $90.4M for Inside Out.  It remains to be seen if Pets can match Inside Out‘s nearly 4x multiple, but whatever happens from here, […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  A huge weekend for Warner Brothers, pushes the studio back into a secure second place among the Hollywood studios. Scroll down for domestic and overseas grosses for each film individually so far in 2014. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2014 is still running -6% behind last […]

  OPENINGS:  Jordan Peele’s NOPE (Universal) premiered on the lower end of expectations at $44M.  That’s a significant number for a project that isn’t based on preexisting IP, but down 38% from Peele’s US, and Nope reportedly cost about $40-50M more than US to produce.  Add the fact that Peele’s films haven’t performed particularly well […]

  OPENINGS:  ONE PIECE FILM: RED (Crunchyroll/Sony) opened at $9.5M, on the low end of recent national anime releases compared to Jujutsu Kaisen‘s $18M and Dragon Ball Super‘s $21.1M.  As is typical for the genre, it was extremely frontloaded, earning more than 50% of its weekend total by the end of Friday.  However, its US […]

  OPENINGS:  KONG: SKULL ISLAND (Legendary/Tencent/Warners) is playing as a quasi-family movie, perhaps in response to the R-rated Logan and Get Out.  That gave it a much more muscular Saturday than similar big-budget monster movies, up 19% on Saturday where Godzilla fell 16% and Pacific Rim dropped 13%.  With that boost, Kong should hit its […]

  The box office effect of the upcoming holidays is already being seen, as studios are estimating extremely low Sunday drops from Saturday based on seasonal patterns.  With one conspicuous exception, everything in town is doing at least moderately well. OPENINGS:  ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES (Paramount) didn’t carry off the weekend crown, and at […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  20th Century Fox has pushed past $2.9 billion worldwide in 2014 to date, as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes gets rolling overseas.  Paramount is the other studio with more than $100 million this past week (thanks to continued strong overseas receipts for Transformers: Age of Extinction) now past $1.5 billion worldwide for the […]

  OPENINGS:  INSIDE OUT 2 (Pixar/Disney) overdelivered massively compared to expectations with $155M in the US, a remarkable $65M higher than the start for 2015’s original Inside Out, and depending whether you count the “live-action” CG remake of The Lion King ($191.8M) as animated, either the #2 or #3 US opening for an animated feature […]