OPENINGS:  Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD (Columbia/Sony) had a 21% Saturday drop, indicating a fair amount of frontloading, but studio estimates have it reaching its goal at $40.4M for the weekend, setting a new record for the filmmaker by topping Inglourious Basterds‘ $38.1M.  (However, Basterds opened in the era before opening […]

  TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (Paramount) held very well on its second day of release, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline and elsewhere.  Its Day 2 drop was in the neighborhood of 15%, which is about as well as Guardians of the Galaxy held last week (down 18%). despite the huge advantage Guardians seemed to have […]

    Beware of studio estimates and round numbers. OPENINGS:  In order to get MEN IN BLACK 3 (Sony) to a round $70M for the 4-day weekend, the studio had to claim the lowest Monday drop of the market’s Top 9 films–even though MIB3 hasn’t shown any particular strength with the family matinee audience (its […]

  OPENINGS:  The most hyped box office weekend of the year delivered and then some.  BARBIE (Mattel/Warners) burst into theaters with $155M, technically the best of the year (although the $146.4M for Super Mario Bros came after a Wed-Thurs start that had already brought in $58.3M).  Among the many records set by the blockbuster were […]

The weekend looks like a mediocre $82 million for the top 12 films, a little softer than it looked yesterday (now slightly lagging the multi-year average for this weekend).  Argo continues to do well, as we expected, but the four openers all did even worse than our conservative predictions in Wednesday’s ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Forecast. The ShowbuzzDaily Domestic Final estimates […]

  OPENINGS:  For a Wednesday opening, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (Huahua/Paramount) had a fairly good 27% Saturday bump in the US (by comparison, 2011’s Dark of the Moon went up just 5% on its parallel day), which pushed the weekend estimate a bit to $45.3M, giving the film $69.1M over 5 days.  That’s still far […]

> THE HELP will be the year’s first “serious” movie to gross over $100M.  September is traditionally one of the softest months on the movie release calendar, and 2011 is no exception:  although there are a few promising arrivals like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion and the film adaptation of  Moneyball, the major openings (they hope) include […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #10 of 2015 now looks like $79 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a little better than yesterday’s $77 million estimate but still down significantly from the norms for this weekend among the worst first weekends of March on record.   Opening at 3,201 theaters Friday, Chappie from Warner […]