>Deadline is reporting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is opening to an eye-popping $90-100 million Friday.  This estimate from Warner Brothers includes the incredible $43.5 from midnight showings.  This destroys the single-day record of $72.7 million by Twilight Saga: New Moon on Friday, November 20, 2009.  Even adjusted for inflation, this is […]

> There’s no way to slice or dice the numbers for COWBOYS AND ALIENS and make them any less sad.  The picture cost at least $165M (that’s the amount Universal will admit to), plus another $150M or so for worldwide marketing, and as Mitch Metcalf notes, it’s now on track to gross less than $100M […]

> Variety has some very early Friday numbers.  As of midafternoon, The Lion King is doing well, with numbers that are being extrapolated to $15M+ for the weekend.  The other newcomers are less impressive:  Drive may get to a possible $10M+ weekend (the film has received exceptional reviews totalling 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, so it’ll […]

> The tiny 3% drop in PUSS IN BOOTS‘ second weekend is truly remarkable, and could well lead to studios adopting DreamWorks’ strategy in the future of opening an animated movie on Halloween weekend and then having a de facto 2d opening the following week.  (However, the picture is still running $13M below Megamind‘s 10 […]

> Deadline has preliminary figures for Thursday’s boxoffice, and they appear to be fairly steady with Wednesday, consistent with last year’s pattern but below 2010’s totals.  MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL (Paramount) remains at the head of the pack with $6.2M, down about 10%.  This compares with $7.1M for last year’s #1 on the Thursday […]

> You’re frontloaded!  No, you’re frontloaded! OPENINGS:  The movie audience has 3 main components–men, women, kids–and a weekend that offers a strong title for each one has a good chance of being successful.  The relatively low-budget THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) got off to a great start (too bad it’s not a great movie), with $15.4M […]

> So what just happened, and what’s likely to happen next?  Here’s a quick look at what’s new in Panem: FINAL NUMBERS:  It turns out THE HUNGER GAMES wasn’t such a hit after all, earning a measly $152.5M in its first 3 days of release, instead of the estimated $155M.  Actually the discrepancy was pretty […]

  Deadline has preliminary boxoffice figures for Thursday, and reports that THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (Sony) was at $16.3M for the day, down 30% from July 4th.  If that number holds, it would be slightly better than the 34% drop Transformers had on July 5 in 2007.  At this point in its run Transformers had earned $84.9M, or […]