>Four new movies join the worldwide box office chart this weekend, with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island being the early standout.  Released overseas a week before this weekend’s North American opening, Journey 2 already has an overseas total of $75 million to date, nearly matching our total domestic projection of $79 million.  The first in […]

  Our summertime look at the health of Hollywood’s studios continues.  We’ve already examined Disney and Warner Bros, and today Paramount is in our viewfinder. Since getting out of both the Marvel and the DreamWorks Animation business, Paramount has been sedate, even sedentary, with the quietest summer of any studio.  Management has been fairly stable, […]

  There wasn’t much shift in position among the top titles at the Saturday box office.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (Nickelodeon/Paramount) kept its $1M edge over GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Marvel/Disney), roughly $11M to $10M.  For Turtles, that’s down about 50% from last Saturday, and suggests it will end […]

International box office for 2013 releases through February 9, 2014.  Frozen now has Despicable Me 2 in its sights, after passing both Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in recent weeks.  And another very good week for The Wolf of Wall Street overseas as it approaches $300 million worldwide. Click here for a summary of worldwide performance by […]

>Love was in the air Tuesday night, as The Vow grossed $11.6 million on Valentine’s Day, shattering the mid-week Valentine’s Day record of $7.5 million for Hitch in 2005, as reported at the Hollywood Reporter.  The Vow was up from a more typical $3.3 million Monday. Business was also brisk for the more male-oriented action […]

Hotel Transylvania joins the worldwide chart at #14 (among films released the past four months), and it will probably move up to 8th place as the overseas receipts come in. Compared to last week, Resident Evil: Retribution and Ted were the big gainers overseas (up $34 million and $26 million since last week, respectively).

  OPENINGS:  Pedro Almodovar’s PARALLEL MOTHERS (Sony Classics) expanded to wide release at 684 theaters in anticipation of the Oscar nominations that are little more than a week away, but its $300K weekend translated into a per-theater average under $500. HOLDOVERS:  The lack of any new Hollywood competition was as usual good for the films […]

  OPENINGS:  ANGEL HAS FALLEN (Millenium/Lionsgate) smartly picked a weekend to open that was far enough away from Hobbs & Shaw with its larger and overlapping audience, and near enough to the end of summer to keep the competition sparse  The result was a solid $21.3M opening, almost the equal of the last franchise installment […]