Latest International Box Office overview.

  OPENINGS:  THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM), with its currently estimated $84.8M opening, has broken the previous December record (2007’s I Am Legend) by about 10%.  However, it’s also on track to be the first Lord of the Rings-related film to make less than $300M at the US boxoffice, despite being the first in […]

The weekend looks a little softer than it did yesterday ($131 million for the top 12 films rather than $142 million).  The Hobbit is looking like an $85 million opening weekend instead of almost $99 million.   Still a record December opening weekend (beating I Am Legend’s $77.2 million opening weekend December 14-16, 2007) but not at […]

  THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) will shatter all the December records it was expected to shatter, but based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, its projected $85M weekend is somewhat soft, considering that it had $37.5M on Friday alone.  That’s about a 2.25 weekend multiple, considerably lower than The Avengers (2.57) or Skyfall (2.77) […]

  OPENINGS:  This weekend consists of THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) and then everything else.  Hobbit set a December opening day record with $37.5M, and it will set the opening weekend record for the month (currently held by I Am Legend with $77.2M), but it’s worth noting that its number isn’t very much higher […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #50 is on pace to exceed the  multi-year average for this weekend by a very solid 27%, and the $142 million total for the top 12 films is the best since December 14-16, 2007 ($152 million).  This weekend is all about Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which is on track to […]

  It’s impossible to know at this point how the unspeakable events in Newtown on Friday will affect family behavior over the weekend, and even though this tragedy, unlike the Aurora massacre in July, has no direct connection to movies or theaters, the crowds that might have attended matinees of a four-quadrant event like THE […]

  The cash has started pouring in for THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM).  In 3100 theatres, the film earned $13M in midnight screenings last night.  That was considerably higher than the $8M earned by the midnights for Return of the King, but King was in2003, before the phenomenon of midnight releases had really taken hold […]