Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #33 of 2013 looks like an okay $120 million for the top 12 films, up 6% from the average for this weekend the past few years but down 6% from last year’s comparable weekend.  Opening at 2,933 theaters Friday, Lee Daniels’ The Butler from Weinstein grossed $8.3 million Friday and is on track […]

  If preliminary numbers at Deadline hold, what was supposed to be a fairly competitive box office weekend will instead be a romp for THE BUTLER (Weinstein).  It’s claiming a $9M Friday, which should give it at least $25M for the weekend.  That would be in line with the $26M opening for The Help in mid-August […]

  All four of this weekend’s wide releases began with Thursday night screenings last night, but only KICK-ASS 2 (Universal) reported the results.  Kick Ass 2 started with a $1.3M Thursday (screenings started at 8PM), below last week’s Elysium ($1.7M) but in the same range as White House Down ($1.35M) and 2 Guns ($1.2M).  Both […]

The 33rd weekend of the year is looking like $133 million for the top 12 films, up a sizable 17% from the average for a normally extremely sleepy weekend.  Opening at around 2,800 2,940 theaters Friday (very close to the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Kick-Ass 2 from Universal should average $8,900 $8,500 per […]

  Here’s an instructive piece of box office math, courtesy of Disney and The Lone Ranger.  Ranger cost (including worldwide marketing) about $350M all told, and it’s going to have global theatrical revenues of about $240M.  Disney is reporting that the movie will end up losing around $190M, which is $80M higher than the usual […]

Updated international box office chart:

STUDIO SCORECARD. Warner Brothers has moved past Universal to take the #2 spot on the worldwide box office chart for 2013.  The opening of We’re the Millers and continued overseas strength from Pacific Rim and to a lesser extent The Conjuring powered Warner Brothers to the best week of the studios. Reminder: the chart below has been reformatted and expanded […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, Weekend #32 of 2013 now looks like $142 million for the top 12 films, down from yesterday’s $148 million estimate but still up 6% from the average for this weekend the past few years.  Opening at 3,284 theaters Friday, Elysium from Sony grossed $11.0 million Friday and $10.8 million Saturday, now on […]