Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #52 of 2014 looks like $192 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, up +21% from the norm for this weekend ($158 million) and up +6% from the same weekend last year.   Opening at 3,131 theaters Thursday, Unbroken from Universal is on track for a $32.3 million opening three-day weekend (well above […]

  Studio honesty is rare enough to be worth noting when it appears:  THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) could easily have juiced its Sunday estimate to claim the #2 second weekend of all time today, but instead it was content with being #4, at $74.5M  just $1.1M behind Avatar and $700K behind The Dark […]

Weekend #8 of 2015 is looking like $119 million for the top 12 films this weekend (Friday-Sunday), another weekend well above the normal volume for this weekend (see track below). Opening at around 2,600 theaters Friday (slightly below the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Hot Tub Time Machine 2 from […]

> $59.99 for home VOD — Genius! Box office normally starts to pick up when the calendar turns to November, moving from $90-100 million per weekend through most of October to $120 million or more per weekend in early November (building toward $185 million or more for the Friday-Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend).  Last year’s first […]

>The weekend studio estimates (based on Friday and Saturday actuals and projections for Sunday) are coming in about the same as the weekend numbers posted yesterday (based on Friday actuals only).  The box office volume for the top 12 films is now looking like $117 million for the weekend, up 14% from last year’s weekend […]

For the 9 days December 16-24, the top 10 films each day in North America have totaled $430 million, nearly identical to last year’s pace and above all other years except 2015, when Star Wars: The Force Awakens dominated the holiday season. With Rogue One last year and The Last Jedi this year, the Star Wars franchise has definitely taken the holiday movie season […]

The 36th weekend of the year (usually the lowest-grossing weekend of the year) is looking like $73 million for the top 12 films, actually above the four-year average for this weekend ($65 million) and way above last year’s stuning bad $52 million on this weekend.  Nothing to get excited about, but not the black hole it could be.  A […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has preliminary Friday numbers suggesting that BREAKING DAWN PART 1 will gross $65-75M for the day, including $30.3M in Thursday midnight showings.  Even at the high-end, that would make Breaking Dawn more front-loaded with midnight viewers than its November 2009 predecessor New Moon, which made $72.7M on its opening Friday, of […]