> $59.99 for home VOD — Genius! Box office normally starts to pick up when the calendar turns to November, moving from $90-100 million per weekend through most of October to $120 million or more per weekend in early November (building toward $185 million or more for the Friday-Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend).  Last year’s first […]

>Based on Friday and Saturday box office (and estimated Sunday numbers), The Help continues at #1 yet again, down only 2% from last week.  This is really getting to be a tired headline, but with the feeble crop of recent releases The Help is just taking full advantage of the situation.  The weekend overall is now […]

Weekend #2 of 2015 is looking like $118 million for the top 12 films this weekend, very close to the norm for this weekend and down slightly from the same weekend last year. Opening at 3,500 theaters Friday (above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Taken 3 from Fox should average a decent $8,700 per […]

  Those waiting for Marvel to stumble will have to go on waiting.  Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, THOR: RAGNAROK (Marvel/Disney) had a $46M opening day (including $14.5M from Thursday night), the highest for any Marvel Universe title released outside the May-July corridor.  Opening day was up 44% from the start of Thor:  The […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  20th Century Fox had a terrific week with the combination of the okay arrival of How to Train Your Dragon 2 and the continued overseas revenue from X-Men Days of Future Past.  Fox now stands at over $2.2 billion worldwide year to date, miles ahead of Warner Brothers ($1.7 billion), which is still seeing overseas […]

  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 […]

  It appears as though Hollywood is going to have some good news at the boxoffice this weekend, for the first time since mid-summer.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, the surprisingly sprightly HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (Sony) is off to a big start with a $11M Friday that should mean around a $38M weekend.  That number […]

  It’s too soon to tell just how GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS (Legendary/Warners) will fare based on its $19.7M opening day (including $6.3M from Thursday), per preliminary numbers at Deadline.  The reason is that the two previous installments of what Warners calls its “Monsterverse” have had strikingly divergent trajectories at the US box office.  […]