>2012 is underway, and the first week of the year (January 2-8) which includes strong early week business for the holiday holdovers and a better than expected weekend from low-budget The Devil Inside was up substantially from both the same week last year (absolutely jinxed by Nic Cage’s Season of the Witch) and a broader […]

The weekend still looks like a very good $123 million for the top 12 films, a little better than it looked yesterday.  Argo and Sinister flipped places in the weekend rankings.  Argo opened with $5.93 million Friday and jumped to $8.75 million Saturday.  A conservative estimate of $5.4 million today would put the 1979 Iranian Hostage rescue drama over $20 […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has preliminary boxoffice numbers for Friday, and as expected, PUSS IN BOOTS will be the easy weekend winner.  Its $9-9.5M on Friday, if it holds, would probably mean $36-38M for the weekend, which would be a Halloween weekend record, but considerably below other fall animated films like Megamind ($12.5M Friday for […]

  Hollywood generally has little interest in opening films against the Super Bowl, and to the extent it participates, it tries to counterprogram the game by aiming at the young female demographic.  Thus we have a PG-13 horror movie and a YA fantasy-romance this weekend, but neither is finding much of an audience. RINGS (Paramount) […]

And now the waiting game begins for Team Metcalf.  With all but one movie now open, the Metcalf slate now totals almost $1.1 billion to date, with a little but of upside remaining in Madagascar 3 and to some extent Prometheus. Team Salem’s top two films open very soon:  Brave from Pixar this Friday and Amazing Spider-Man […]

> The Marvel superhero audience likes to get its sleep.  Despite the fact that THE AVENGERS is expected to do record-challenging business this weekend, last night’s midnight screenings totaled $18.7M–a tremendous amount of money, to be sure, the 8th largest midnight opening of all time, but 8th place isn’t where Avengers mostly expects to be.  […]

  OPENINGS:  The first “major” release of 2025, DEN OF THIEVES:  PANTERA (Lionsgate) hit its target with a $15.5M launch, almost exactly the same as the $15.2M start for 2018’s Den of Thieves.  That one reached $44.9M in the US and $80.5M worldwide (Pantera hasn’t yet opened internationally), and the economics this time should be […]

  OPENINGS:  In the US, ONWARD (Pixar/Disney) was merely a disappointment by Pixar standards, with an OK 37% Saturday bump that allowed it to claim a $40M weekend, pending actuals on Monday.  That isn’t much better then the $34.7M launch for last year’s Lego Movie 2, and it’s far off last March’s $55M for How […]