> Deadline has preliminary boxoffice figures for Wednesday, and there doesn’t seem to be great news for anyone.  BREAKING DAWN PART 1 appears to be the easy winner for the day and probably for Thanksgiving weekend, but its $12.5M for Wednesday, if it holds, would be more than 10% off the parallel date for 2009’s […]

> As detailed in Mitch Metcalf’s Weekend Boxoffice Report, New Year’s Day wasn’t the bonanza the studios were expecting it to be. PARAMOUNT:  MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL‘s Sunday increase was less than half of the 33% projected, and it’s likely to fall another 15-20% today, giving it a bit over $140M in total and […]

> Moral of the weekend:  If you’re going to spend $250M+ on a movie, check first whether anyone wants to see it. OPENINGS:  With a probable $27-28M opening, just how big a flop is JOHN CARTER (Disney) going to be?  Hard to tell until full weekend and international numbers are in.  But its sheer cost–probably […]

> THE HUNGER GAMES (Lionsgate/Summit) continues to overperform.  Based on preliminary Saturday numbers at Deadline, it’s headed for a $21.7M weekend and a total so far of $335.7M, a spectacular 35% decline for a blockbuster in its 4th weekend (and even better than it sounds, because last weekend included the Good Friday holiday).  If it […]

Question #1 on this weekend’s boxoffice:  if The Dark Knight Rises is a blockbuster but everything else Warners releases this summer is a bomb, is the studio having a good summer?  Based on preliminary Friday numbers at Deadline, ROCK OF AGES joins Dark Shadows (and Chernobyl Diaries, too) as a Warner Bros summer flop.  Rock […]

The Amazing Spider-Man pulled its overseas total to $202 million to date (up from $50 million at this time last week).  We’ll give The Amazing Spider-Man an initial overseas target of $510 million, toward the high end of the overseas totals for the previous trilogy with Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man 3 May 2007 $554 million overseas total, Spider-Man May 2002 $418 million, Spider-Man […]

  How much of Friday’s mediocre boxoffice is attributable to a post-Aurora uneasiness about going to multiplexes, how much to competition from the most watched Olympics Opening Ceremonies in history, and how much to simple lack of enthusiasm about the movies on display?  All three probably played a part. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (Warners) was […]

Weekend #34 of 2012 looks like a typically bad fourth weekend of August.  Three shitty new films open and a political documentary goes semi-wide, and each should be well under $10 million for the weekend.  The top 12 films this weekend should total $89 million, about the same pace for the comparable weekend the last […]