Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #50 of 2013 looks like $144 million for the top 12 films from Friday-Sunday, not as strong as we had forecast but still up double digits in terms of percent increase over comparable weekends the past several years.   Opening at 3,903 theaters Friday, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug from Warner Brothers […]

  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, […]

Weekend #29 of 2015 is looking like $195 million for the top 12 films this weekend, somewhat above the norm for this weekend and way above last year’s very soft weekend (see comparisons below).   Ant-Man from Disney and Marvel should open with a $64.5 million three-day weekend. Early reviews at RottenTomatoes are decent: 75% positive overall so far. Ant-Man is on track […]

  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 […]

> Hollywood, like teen girls before a Twilight opening, counts the hours until THE AVENGERS arrives. OPENINGS:  Universal badly miscalculated when it scheduled THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT for a weekend when Think Like A Man and The Lucky One were both available for the romance market.  The movie was moderately budgeted (although it had a substantial […]

>Six full weeks into 2012, domestic box office continues to run well ahead of last year’s anemic pace and now has moved slightly ahead of the comparable period’s average for the last several years.  The Vow officially opened at #1 with $41,202,458 the first three days (missing the studio estimate of $41,700,000 issued Sunday morning).  […]

  OPENINGS:  PAIN & GAIN (Paramount) is a “relationship” movie, not in the sense of the relationships between the movie’s characters (oh God, no), but the relationship between the studio and its director, Michael Bay.  This was a passion project for Bay, and Paramount agreed to let him make it–and oh, by the way, also […]

> TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON is reporting (pending actual numbers tomorrow) a 4-day weekend gross of $116.7M, giving it a total of $181.1M since opening Tuesday evening.  That puts it around 10% ahead of the original Transformers and 15% behind Transformers 2.  The original Transformers declined only 47% in its second weekend (the first […]