OPENINGS:  Word of mouth caught up with THE EMOJI MOVIE (Columbia/Sony) on Saturday, with a 14% drop (by comparison, Captain Underpants rose 11% on its 2d day of release, and last year’s Angry Birds Movie jumped 47%), but a $25.7M weekend is still good money for a movie no one seems to like.  (The […]

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted now looks like a $60.4 million weekend, according to the studio estimate this morning (down from yesterday’s early estimate but still exceeding our forecast in Wednesday’s ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Predictions).  Prometheus is looking like a $50.0 million weekend (or so 20th Century Fox is fervently wishing and hoping), down from yesterday’s […]

The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between September 24 and September 30 grossed a decent $136 million, up 7% from the four-year average for the week and up a similar 8% from the same week last year.     The past six weeks are now down 5% from the […]

  OPENINGS:  With a $10M production budget (and tens of millions in marketing on top), the $10.6M weekend for SINISTER 2 (Blumhouse/Gramercy/Focus/Universal) will test Blumhouse’s ability to make money out of just about anything.  The opening is far below the $18M start for 2012’s Sinister, and its US total won’t be near the $48.1M gross […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2017 film slates by studio, including early 2018 dollars for films released later in 2017. We will start tracking the 2018 studio slates in a few weeks. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2018 to date is now +7% above last […]

> Deadline has some preliminary numbers for Friday’s boxoffice, and as expected, REAL STEEL is headed for a weekend victory.  Assuming that it gets the Saturday bump that usually goes to pictures targeted at family audiences, Steel should reach around $26-27M for the weekend, in line with Mitch Metcalf’s predictions.  That number will still leave […]

  It’s impossible to know at this point how the unspeakable events in Newtown on Friday will affect family behavior over the weekend, and even though this tragedy, unlike the Aurora massacre in July, has no direct connection to movies or theaters, the crowds that might have attended matinees of a four-quadrant event like THE […]

The 37th weekend of the year is looking like $81 million for the top 12 films, very close to the multi-year average for this weekend. Opening at around 2,900 theaters Friday (just above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Insidious Chapter 2 from FilmDistrict and director James Wan should average $11,300 per theater for […]