> Deadline has early Saturday and weekend estimates, but they don’t clarify much.  As of right now, the claim is that COWBOYS AND ALIENS is at $26.2M for Friday/Saturday, with THE SMURFS at $25.9M.  If those numbers hold, logic would say that Smurfs should have the upper hand with its family Sunday matinee audience, but […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has early Friday numbers, and they foretell some surprises for the weekend boxoffice.  Chief among them is the remarkable $7-8M that the 3D pre-Blu-Ray reissue of Disney’s THE LION KING grossed on Friday alone, which should mean a weekend of close to $24M, far above expectations.  The combination of nostalgia and […]

> The new 3D action-fest IMMORTALS got off to a reasonably good start with $1.4M in Thursday midnight screenings.  This isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s slightly higher than the $1.3M RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES made in its midnight runs, and far better than the $550K pulled in last week by A VERY […]

> Well, now it’s all up to WAR HORSE. Cameron Crowe’s WE BOUGHT A ZOO (20th) joined the market on Friday, and it appears to be back to movie jail for Crowe, because according to the Hollywood Reporter, it only made around $3M, even on a day when almost everything else saw 40+% increases.  Although […]

> Hollywood Hearts this weekend. OPENINGS:   It turned out that THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) was indeed slightly more frontloaded than SAFE HOUSE (Universal), but not by enough to rob it of 1st place.  Vow‘s massive $41.7M haul was higher than any opening weekend for a Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock or Katherine Heigl vehicle–ever.  (Cut to […]

> Monday boxoffice is tricky to analyze, because as you’d expect, the all-time list of Monday grosses is largely a history of long holiday weekends, namely Memorial Day, July 4th, Martin Luther King Day, and Christmas/New Year’s week.  So strictly speaking, THE HUNGER GAMES’ $10.8M gross on its 4th day in theatres is only the […]

  We’re now just over 10 days from the 12:01AM July 20 launch of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the summer’s last mammoth movie event, and The Hollywood Reporter has provided the first hard information about the epic’s prerelease tracking.  Not surprisingly, it’s through the roof, slightly below or above (depending on the metric used) the […]

MUCH stronger than we forecast, the 26th weekend of 2012 is looking like $196 million for the Top 12 films Friday-Sunday, up only 2% from this weekend last year but up 15% from the multi-year average for this weekend.  R-rated comedy is just what the audience wanted.  Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane struck gold with […]