The 49th weekend of the year is looking like $97 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, down from last year but up from the usual performance for this weekend over the past several years. Opening at around 2,000 theaters Friday (well below the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Out of […]

  Preliminary numbers at Deadline present a Friday box office in which few titles moved more than 10% from Thursday, typical for the Christmas-to-New Year’s period.  The top 2, once again, were FROZEN (Disney) and THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (Warners/MGM), although with the first moving up around 7% and the other declining by […]

  OPENINGS:  Kevin Hart has been hanging around the edges of being a movie star for a few years now, and RIDE ALONG (Universal) makes it official.  With a $14.5M Friday start, it could challenge Cloverfield for the Martin Luther King weekend title, currently at $46.1M.  For Universal, this is the start of a nicely […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #7 of 2014 now looks like $160 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, much lower than yesterday’s estimate ($171 million) but still 22% ahead of this weekend’s average the past several years.  Saturday was not kind to three of the four new movies (except RoboCop).  We know […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Year to date, Warner Brothers has moved well ahead of its competing studios, thanks to two bona fide hits to balance two strikeouts.  Sony and Universal, the next level down each with around $450 million worldwide to date, has a similar hit and miss ratio to Warner Brothers, but the hits are […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #15 of 2014 looks like $131 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a significant downgrade from yesterday’s estimate but still 17% above the four-year average for this weekend ($112 million).  Rio 2 and Captain America 2 are supporting the box office, while two smaller films in the […]

  OPENINGS:  As summer kick-off weekends go, the $92M for THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (Sony)–which may go down by $1M or so in final numbers tomorrow, given an aggressively high Sunday estimate–was pretty mild.  It came in below the openings of 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013 (above only the first Thor and the first Wolverine […]

  OPENINGS:  MALEFICENT (Disney) didn’t come cheap–with worldwide marketing, its price-tag will top $300M.  But it seems to be money well spent, as its $24.2M Friday should propel it into a $70M+ weekend.  It’s also launching well overseas, with $20M on Friday from 35 markets (plus $21M from some of those markets in the 2 […]