Weekend #30 of 2012 looks like $143 million for the top 12 films, the same as last year’s comparable weekend but down 16% from the four-year average for the weekend.  Two new movies will try to take on The Dark Knight Rises without any chance of success. Opening at about 3,000 theaters, The Watch from 20th […]

  OPENINGS:  Things couldn’t have gone better for M. Night Shyamalan’s SPLIT (Blumhouse/Universal).  It built on its strong Friday with a 13% bump, extremely good for a horror movie, and is estimating $40.2M for its weekend in the US against modest production/marketing costs of about $50M, which means a healthy profit is a sure thing.  […]

  OPENINGS:  WONKA (Warners) kicked off the holiday movie season with $39M, at the upper end of expectations.  As a family entertainment, it can look forward to a high multiple into January, and could reach $200M+ in the US, against around $250M in production/marketing costs.  The IP musical is even stronger overseas, where it expanded […]

>The past week (seven days ending Sunday) is up 11% versus last year’s comparable week, thanks to solid continued business for Dolphin Tale, Moneyball and The Lion King in 3D.  Year-to-date box office is now down 3.3% versus last year, the smallest year-to-year margin we’ve seen so far this year.        The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All […]

Men in Black 3 increased to $275 million overseas to date (up sharply from $132 million last week).  Battleship has stalled overseas — the foreign total is now $235 million (up marginally from $233 million last week).  Dark Shadows moved up to $121 million (from $107 million last week), putting the Tim Burton film within sight of maybe $225 million […]

> MONEYBALL‘s debut looks to be in line with the opening weekend of The Social Network ($22.4M) just about a year ago.  That movie rode the Oscar race to a $97M gross.  Moneyball is more likable but less incisive than Network, and while it’s going to be part of the Oscar conversation, it’s less likely […]

Twelve days into the three-week holiday movie season, 2012 is now 9.0% behind the average for the same period over the last several years ($362 million this year versus $398 million on average 2004-2011).  Further, 2012 is 12.1% behind the last time Christmas fell on a Tuesday (2007’s $412 million over this period).   After […]

  OPENINGS:  ANGEL HAS FALLEN (Millenium/Lionsgate) smartly picked a weekend to open that was far enough away from Hobbs & Shaw with its larger and overlapping audience, and near enough to the end of summer to keep the competition sparse  The result was a solid $21.3M opening, almost the equal of the last franchise installment […]