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:  STRANGE WORLD (Disney) couldn’t muster any significant family audience over the Thanksgiving holiday, with $18.6M for the full 5 days and $11.9M for the 3-day weekend.  Nor did it have appeal overseas, where it managed just $9.2M in 43 territories.  Strange World was a disaster that the studio seems to have seen coming, as […]

  Preliminary figures at Deadline give THE BUTLER (Weinstein) a commanding victory over its competition.  Very impressively, on Saturday Butler reportedly increased its take by about 10% over Friday, putting it on target for a $23-25M weekend (The Weinstein Company, which has never been shy about aggressively estimating its weekends, could make a run for […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, the final weekend of 2013 looks like a great finish: $193 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, up substantially from the same weekend last year (see comparisons to previous years at the bottom).  The new films this long weekend are actually not breaking through in a big way: it’s the […]

  STAR WARS:  Whether one considers Avatar‘s proper US all-time box office record to be $749.8M (initial release) or $760.5M (includes “director’s cut” re-release), the crown will be changing hands in the next few days.  STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (Lucasfilm/Disney), which declined 41% on its 3rd weekend to $88.3M (setting yet another record by […]

  OPENINGS:  OCEAN’S EIGHT (Village Roadshow/Warners) had a $41.5M weekend, the highest of the Ocean’s movies by a bit (not adjusting for inflation).  The only point of concern is that it’s the first Ocean’s movie to drop on Saturday (by 4%, where the others had risen 6-17%), although that may only reflect the fact that […]

>This weekend is all about Twilight Breaking Dawn, which will be huge.  But Happy Feet Two should manage an opening that would look stellar on any other recent weekend.  Overall box office this weekend should be up 33% from the same weekend last year.         Opening at more than 4,100 theaters in North […]

  OPENINGS:  The world, if not the galaxy, belonged to GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Marvel/Disney) this weekend.  In the US, its $94M start (as is typical, Disney estimated an aggressively strong Sunday, down just 19% from Saturday, so that number may reduce a bit tomorrow) pulverized the previous August record-holder (The Bourne Ultimatum) to the tune […]