OPENINGS:  PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (Paramount) was an experiment in several ways–the first installment of the franchise to be a spin-off and not a direct sequel, the first released out of the Halloween season, and one of Hollywood’s first tries at producing and marketing a movie primarily to the Latino audience.  All of […]

International box office for 2013 releases through February 2, 2014.  Frozen has pushed past Hunger Games: Catching Fire, after passing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in the yearly worldwide rankings last week.  The Wolf of Wall Street (now #33 for the year) is putting some distance between it and American Hustle (still #41 worldwide).  While American Hustle is winning domestically, Wolf is dominating […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #9 of 2014 looks like $110 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, somewhat better than we forecast Wednesday ($100 million) but 18% below the average for this weekend. Opening at 3,090 theaters Friday, Non-Stop from Universal grossed $10.1 million Friday and $12.4 million Saturday, keeping the film on track for […]

  Proving, once again, that opening night exit polls are all but meaningless, preliminary numbers at Deadline have NOAH (Paramount/Regency) rising as much as 20% from Friday to Saturday despite a “C” grade that supposedly predicted poisonous word of mouth.  In fact, for a non-family release, a 20% Saturday bump is excellent–by way of comparison, […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  A great week for Fox, which vaults into second place and just over $900 million worldwide box office year to date.  The very strong Fox week was paced by the domestic rollout of The Other Woman and continued international strength from Rio 2.  Disney remains in the top spot with just under $1 billion worldwide […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  The release of Godzilla has pushed Warner Brothers into second place, just behind Sony (each with around $1.3 billion worldwide to date in 2014).  20th Century Fox ($1.1 billion to date worldwide) and Disney ($1.0 billion worldwide to date) are fairly close behind.   But Godzilla will really kick in overseas starting with next week’s update, […]

  22 JUMP STREET (Sony) wasted no time in jumping to the lead at last night’s box office, with $5.5M from shows that started at 7PM.  That’s far better than the $2.5M that Neighbors earned a few weeks ago, although to be fair Jump Street plays as an action movie as well as a comedy, […]

  OPENINGS:  It was a sad lot of newcomers this holiday weekend.  TAMMY (Warners) is claiming a $21.2M weekend ($32.9M including Wed-Thurs), which will leave it struggling to get past $70M in the US.  (It also brought in $2.5M from a very small initial overseas release.)  DELIVER US FROM EVIL (Screen Gems/Sony) had a relatively […]