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 […]

  OPENINGS:  CRAZY RICH ASIANS (Color Force/SK Global/Warners) had a strong 42% Saturday bump, an especially bright sign for a film that might have been expected to play as front-loaded for a niche audience.  That pushed its weekend to $25.2M, with a total of $34M since its Wednesday opening.  It was just slightly below the […]

  OPENINGS:  THE GRINCH (Illumination/Universal) rode its family movie 47% Saturday bump to a $66M weekend, 20% better than 2000’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas.  There are relatively few recent mid-November family movie releases, because Disney has established its ownership of the Thanksgiving corridor that starts less than 2 weeks later (this year’s installment is […]

  THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART (Warners Animation) is looking like a textbook example of a studio watering down its own franchise.  Warners jumped into 2 spin-offs before even reaching its first official sequel, and the result according to early numbers at Deadline is a $8.9M opening day, down 48% from the first […]

  After AVENGERS: ENDGAME (Marvel/Disney) torched the record books last weekend, the remaining question was whether it would have the stamina to challenge the biggest records of them all, The Force Awakens in the US ($936.7M) and Avatar worldwide ($2.79B).  It’s not clear after Friday whether this weekend will answer that in a definitive way.  […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2019 film slates by studio. BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2019 is now -5% below last year’s comparable span (1 point better than last week) and now even with this point the past four years ($6.477 billion).  Over the same period, Hollywood […]

  OPENINGS:  KNIVES OUT (MRC/Lionsgate) scored a victory for non-IP, adult-oriented filmmaking with a strong $27M over the 3-day weekend ($41.7M since Wednesday), and although December box office can be tough to predict, with a plunge expected next weekend and then the arrival of multiple presumptive blockbusters, Knives Out seems to be on track for […]

  OPENINGS:  The hugely-anticipated US opening box office numbers for TENET (Warners) turned out to be frustratingly opaque to interpret, and to the extent they were comprehensible, simply not very good.  (Let’s assume it was coincidental and not meta that some are saying the same about the film itself.)  Warners issued a grand total of […]