OPENINGS:  Despite the strong weekend, it’s a bit troubling that GROWN UPS 2 (Sony) fell 11% on Saturday (the original Grown Ups rose 2% on its 2d day), suggesting frontloading and less than great word of mouth.  That may place the studio’s estimated Sunday drop of 21% and $42.5M weekend total in doubt, but […]

Updated international box office chart:

STUDIO SCORECARD. Another very strong week for Universal (primarily overseas grosses for Despicable Me 2 which were understated in last week’s chart), enough to pass Warner Brothers and move into the #2 spot in terms of worldwide box office.  The perennial also-ran Universal finds itself in an odd position: in the upper tier of the worldwide […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, Weekend #28 of 2013 looks like a decent $191 million for the top 12 films, up 5% from the comparable weekend the last few years.  It was a pretty good weekend for the ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Forecast, with the top movies in the correct rank order and most films within […]

  What kind of summer movie season has it been, really?  For the past several weeks, business has been consistently up, erasing the losses from a soft spring, and even with 3D, Imax and inflation taken into account, more tickets are being sold.  But this marks the fourth consecutive weekend that an expensive, high-profile summer […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #28 of 2013 looks like a decent $192 million for the top 12 films, up 5% from the comparable weekend the last few years.  It was a pretty good weekend for the ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Forecast, with most movies coming in within one or two million dollars of forecast. Opening at […]

  If the preliminary numbers at Deadline hold, there was good news on Friday for Adam Sandler and his studio, as GROWN UPS 2 (Sony) won the day with a strong $16.5M (including $2.3M from Thursday night).  That’s better than the $14.4M that the original Grown Ups had on its opening day in 2010, and might […]

  Given the overwhelming fanboy appeal of PACIFIC RIM (Warners/Legendary), it’s not exactly a shock that the movie started strong with shows that started at 7PM Thursday night, earning $3.6M.  It’s probably in line for a solid Friday as well–the question will be what happens when the usually frontloaded genre crowd is done and the […]