The answer to yesterday’s box office question–would THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (New Line/MGM/Warners) look more like The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King or Twilight: Eclipse along the course of its 5-day weekend opening–it leaning toward the vampires, which is not good news for Middle-Earth.  On its 2d full day […]

  OPENINGS:  The second entry in the studio’s experiment with split theatrical/HBO Max distribution THE LITTLE THINGS (Warners) arrived with $4.8M in theatres, on the higher end of recent action movie openings ($3.1M for The Marksman, $4M for Unhinged), although of course paltry by pre-pandemic standards.  In addition, the film launched overseas with $2.8M from […]

  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:  STAR TREK BEYOND (Skydance/Alibaba/Huahua/Paramount) had a tepid start, claiming a $59.6M opening weekend in the US.  Even if that number holds (it includes an extremely aggressive Sunday estimate), it would be 20% below the $75..2M 2009 franchise reboot, and even below the $70.2M earned by Star Trek Into Darkness, which opened on a […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #23 of 2014 now looks like $156 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, down from yesterday’s $165 million estimate but still 4% above the norm for this weekend and 9% above the same weekend last year.   Opening at 3,173 theaters, The Fault in Our Stars from 20th Century […]

  OPENINGS:  THE BAD GUYS (DreamWorks Animation/Universal) had a solid $24M start, above (low) projections.  It’s unclear whether the release for the film will fall under the normal Universal non-blockbuster 17-day exclusive theatrical policy, or if Bad Guys will fully be able to take advantage of the lack of family movies in the market until […]

> Reviews have been coming in progressively worse for Cars 2, dropping from 50% positive at RottenTomatoes to 37% as of Friday morning.  In line with this trend is Mitch Salem’s review of the film.  The words “lazy” and “phoning it in” seem to summarize what reviewers think, and that does not bode well for […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2017 film slates by studio, including early 2018 dollars for films released later in 2017. We will start tracking the 2018 studio slates in a few weeks. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. A first look at 2018 year to date after only one week. A reminder: […]