WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2018 film slates by studio. The studio totals also include 2018 dollars for films released in late 2017. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2018 to date is now +8% above last year and now +10% above the average for this point […]

  OPENINGS:  It was a blah MLK Weekend at the box office, driven by soft openings.  Over the 3-day weekend, ONE OF THEM DAYS (TriStar/Sony) was reported to have a very narrow lead with $11.6M, but it was expected to fall into 2nd place with $14M including the Monday holiday.  The good news for Sony […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2018 film slates by studio. The studio totals also include 2018 dollars for films released in late 2017. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2018 to date is now -1% below last year and now +11% above the average for this point the past four […]

  OPENINGS:  WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Columbia/Sony) launched with $17M, ahead of (low) expectations, and fueled by an audience of women in the midwest/south.  There’s no direct competition in sight, and it should be able to leg out past $50M in the US, which would be considered a win for the moderately-budgeted production.  Crawdads may […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2017 film slates by studio. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2017 to date is now down less than -1% from last year and now +2% above the average for this point the past four years ($10.280 billion).  Over the same period, Hollywood films […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Fox rolls on, running away with 2014 worldwide with another $144 million this week (mostly from continued strong overseas grosses from Maze Runner and Gone Girl).  Fox is a huge #1 with almost $4.2 billion for the year to date worldwide.  The next best week came from lowly Universal ($134 million worldwide the past week), […]

  OPENINGS:  Let’s be clear:  the decision to greenlight a $100M production budget for IN THE HEART OF THE SEA (Village Roadshow/Warners)–a period whaling adventure that features about 10 minutes of a CG whale and is otherwise mostly (spoiler alert) about the cast starving and suffering–was fundamentally insane.  Even if the film had been good, […]

  OPENINGS:  Despite being the only high-profile arrival of the week, and having a pedigree and visual style that guaranteed it media attention, Robert Zemeckis’s HERE (Miramax/TriStar/Sony) bombed with $5M.  It’s been a tough decade for Zemeckis, once a maker of blockbuster hits, whose most recent moderate success was 2012’s Flight.  Here hasn’t opened overseas, […]