>International box office results show that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 continues to surge: its overseas gross to date is now over $850 million and its estimated worldwide total exceeds $1.2 billion.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes now stands at #14, but it is just getting started overseas.  It is probably […]

  INSIDE OUT (Pixar/Disney) is in line for the biggest non-sequel opening in the history of animation.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have it winning Friday with $32.8M (that includes $3.7M from Thursday night), on its way to a weekend that should be at least $85M–and could be more, since word of mouth should be sky-high.  […]

> Well, there’s something you don’t see every day:  2 studios both content to forego bragging rights for the Sunday weekend estimates and wait for actual numbers on Monday, when public attention is lower. (Note:  The Hot Blog, which calculates its own numbers, has COWBOYS & ALIENS up by $100K.)  The important thing to remember […]

  Oscar weekend boxoffice is one of those chicken-and-egg situations where it’s not clear whether the major studios stay away because no one goes to the movies that weekend, or if no one goes to the movies because there’s nothing new to see.  However self-fulfilling the prophecy may be, things are quiet at the multiplex […]

> Mitch Metcalf will doubtless have more to say about this later today, but the weekend’s actual boxoffice totals have just been announced, and the surprise is that CARS 2 ended up almost $2M below the number Disney predicted yesterday, $66.1M rather than $68M.  This translates into a Sunday drop that was far heavier than […]

  OPENINGS:  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (Sony) won’t arrive in the US for almost 2 weeks, and so far it’s in only 14 international markets–and it was still the biggest story of the weekend, pulling in $47M in those territories, which included portions of Europe as well as Australia and Mexico.  Amazing 2 is following […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  20th Century Fox has broken away from the pack with over $2.8 billion worldwide to date for 2014, with another almost $400 million worldwide last week.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has enormous upside overseas and it will quickly move out of the middle $100-299 million category to the $300+ million […]

  With a franchise like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 (Marvel/Disney), profitability isn’t at issue.  Guardians 2 carries around $350M in worldwide production/marketing costs, and it will be in hailing distance of financial success by Sunday.  The question is how the given installment ranks in terms of similar mega-competition and expectations.  Preliminary numbers at […]