Based on grosses from Wednesday and Thanksgiving, Weekend #47 is on pace to exceed the multi-year average for this weekend by 10% — exactly on the pace we forecast earlier in the week.  Breaking Dawn Part 2 is running slightly behind our forecast pace in this second weekend, but still clearly #1 for the weekend. […]

The domestic box office was back down this week.  Volatility has been the operative word recently.  The first two weeks of May (April 30-May 13) were up more than 35% each from prior years, followed by the next three weeks (May 14-June 3) which were down around 15% each week.  Then last week was up […]

For the 13 days December 16-28, top 10 films in North America have totaled $831 million, now +71% ahead of the same period last year, +83% above the average since 2002, and +44% ahead of the previous record for this period (2009, the year of Avatar).  Each of the comparisons are down five to ten percentage […]

  OPENINGS:  The summer saga of underperforming franchise titles continued with WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (TSG/20th), with a $56.5M start that’s 22% below the $72.6M opening for Dawn 3 years ago, and just barely ahead of the $54.8M for 2011’s Rise (despite costing $60M more to produce than Rise).  Even with rave […]

  OPENINGS:  Under the current circumstances, the 5-day $17M opening ($9.7M Friday-Sunday) for THE CROODS: A NEW AGE (DreamWorks Animation/Universal) counts as a win, with comparisons to the original Croods or any other Thanksgiving release fairly pointless.  The film also earned $19.2M in China and $1.6M in 6 smaller international markets.  New Age reportedly had […]

  OPENINGS:  Even though THE DISASTER ARTIST (A24) was at just 840 theatres, its $6.4M weekend had no trouble topping its woeful newcomer competition.  That total (which may come down a bit in finals, because A24 tends to be optimistic in its Sunday estimates) translated into a $7700 per-theatre weekend average, notably better than the […]

> The past week (seven days ending Sunday) is up 17% versus last year’s comparable week, thanks to a solid second-weekend hold for the 3D resissue of The Lion King and good openings for Moneyball and Dolphin Tale.  Year-to-date box office is now down 3.5% versus last year, the smallest year-to-year margin we’ve seen so far this year.  The Lion […]

  Nearly identical opening numbers for 3 new movies mean different things. OPENINGS:  Thanks to its older audience, TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE (Warners) may end up winning the weekend, and certainly having the highest overall gross of this weekend’s openings, even though with $4.2M, it was third place on Friday.  However, this is still a […]