Question #1 on this weekend’s boxoffice:  if The Dark Knight Rises is a blockbuster but everything else Warners releases this summer is a bomb, is the studio having a good summer?  Based on preliminary Friday numbers at Deadline, ROCK OF AGES joins Dark Shadows (and Chernobyl Diaries, too) as a Warner Bros summer flop.  Rock […]

The Amazing Spider-Man pulled its overseas total to $202 million to date (up from $50 million at this time last week).  We’ll give The Amazing Spider-Man an initial overseas target of $510 million, toward the high end of the overseas totals for the previous trilogy with Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man 3 May 2007 $554 million overseas total, Spider-Man May 2002 $418 million, Spider-Man […]

A down week this week (last year boasted the opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2) erased the big gains last week, and now the year to year comparisons are back to where they were a few weeks (high single-digit percentages). The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide […]

  THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (Warners) appears to be headed for its 3rd (and probably last) weekend in 1st place, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline.  The Caped Crusader’s Friday is estimated over $10M, which should mean a weekend around $35M.  That would bring its total by Sunday night to over $350M, which would tie […]

  OPENINGS:  THE POSSESSION (Lionsgate) will be a convincing winner over the holiday weekend, based on a Friday that more than doubled the gross of the #2 movie.  Its $6.1M was also 2/3 better than last year’s Labor Day Friday #1, The Help (which was in its 4th week of release at that point).  Possession could […]

After three tough weekends with 20-25% declines versus prior years, the 39th weekend of 2012 is looking like $101 million for the Top 12 films Friday-Sunday, up 13% from the same weekend last year.  Sony opened two films to two completely different segments: Hotel Transylvania opened very well to kids and families, while Looper opened […]

  Ugliness abounds, unless your title is Argo. OPENINGS:  CLOUD ATLAS (Warners) will be the tallest tree in the weekend’s bonzai forest, but that’s small comfort for a movie that cost $100M (plus heavy marketing) and probably won’t make much more than $10M for the weekend, based on its $3.5M Friday.  This, sadly, is why […]

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. […]