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 […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #22 of 2014 looks like $159 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, 16% above the norm for this weekend but -1% from last year.   Opening at 3,948 theaters, Maleficent from Disney grossed $24.2 million Friday and late Thursday, putting the film on track for a $71.0 million opening three-day weekend (well […]

  MALEFICENT (Disney) performed as well as its Thursday night start suggested it might, at the high-end of expectations according to preliminary Friday numbers at Deadline and elsewhere.  The revisionist fairy tale surged to $24-25M on Friday (that includes the $4.1M from Thursday night), and should be headed for a weekend well north of $70M, […]

  MALEFICENT (Disney) made it clear very quickly that it’s not going to play strictly as a family movie, earning a strong $4.2M in Thursday night screenings that began at 7PM.  That’s better than the Thursday night business for Alice in Wonderland ($3.9M) and Oz: The Great and Powerful ($2M), and more than half the […]

Weekend #22 of 2014 is looking like a solid $172 million for the top 12 films this weekend, 26% above the norm for this weekend and 7% above the same weekend last year.   Opening at over 3,800 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Maleficent from Disney should average […]

  The studios continued to be bullish on their holiday estimates, with preliminary Monday numbers expecting strong business that may or may not be confirmed in final box office figures tomorrow.  For now, the most optimistic film is HEAVEN IS FOR REAL (TriStar/Sony), expecting a mere 7% drop on Monday, with the older skewing NEIGHBORS […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  The release of X-Men: Days of Future Past has pushed 20th Century Fox to the top of the heap with over $1.5 billion in worldwide box office in 2014 to date.  The race will ebb and flow through the rest of the summer and into the holiday season, but Fox, Warner Brothers and Sony […]

  (Note:  Most of the studios aggressively estimated their Sunday declines as being around 10%, even though last year’s Memorial Day Weekend Sunday drops were mostly steeper than that, so there could be a number of downward adjustments in store when final numbers are released.) OPENINGS:  X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (20th), oddly enough, was […]