OPENINGS:  THE CONJURING (Warners) behaved like a horror movie on Saturday, falling 18% despite the great reviews and exit polls, but that didn’t stand in the way of its estimated huge $41.5M weekend.  That made it the biggest non-sequel R-rated horror movie ever, and bigger than all the thrillers Warners released under its now-defunct […]

  OPENINGS:  Stop me if you’ve heard this before:  an expensive action-adventure will need to overperform internationally in order to get past its red ink.  With Thor 2 opening in just a week, ENDER’S GAME (Summit/Lionsgate) had a very narrow window to make an impression, and its $9.9M Friday, probably meaning a weekend in the […]

  OPENINGS:  PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (Paramount), with its $18.2M weekend, made less at 2867 theatres than the first Paranormal made at 760, a little more than 4 years ago.  It was also well below the $29M weekend for the last Paranormal installment in 2012 (which had been the franchise low).  In other words, […]

  OPENINGS:  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (Sony) won’t arrive in the US for almost 2 weeks, and so far it’s in only 14 international markets–and it was still the biggest story of the weekend, pulling in $47M in those territories, which included portions of Europe as well as Australia and Mexico.  Amazing 2 is following […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has transformed Paramount into player status (now $2.0 billion worldwide year to date), with much more overseas revenue to come from the film.  With continued overseas returns from Guardians of the Galaxy, Disney ($2.33 billion worldwide to date) has widened its lead over Warner Brothers ($2.16 billion). Scroll down […]

  Last year’s Thanksgiving weekend was the biggest ever, thanks to the combo of Catching Fire and Frozen, and while plenty of tickets were sold over the past few days, this year didn’t come close. OPENINGS:  THE PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR (DreamWorks Animation/20th) was yet another piece of disappointing product for DreamWorks, which really needed to […]

  OPENINGS:  The news never seems to be 100% good for DreamWorks Animation.  In the US, HOME (DWA/20th) had a smashing start with $54M, the studio’s best non-sequel opening since Monsters vs Aliens in 2009, and a better launch than the $49.5M for last year’s How To Train Your Dragon 2.  But overseas, despite last […]

  OPENINGS:  PIXELS (Columbia/Sony) isn’t the first Adam Sandler movie to approach a $90M production budget–incredibly, the first Grown Ups reportedly cost that much–but as his audience shrinks, it becomes more difficult to justify a greenlight for him at that level.  Pixels is reporting a very mild $24M weekend in the US (that number assumes […]