A lot of product made for a decent weekend total, but none of the new films fared particularly well. OPENINGS:  THE EXPENDABLES 2 (Lionsgate) opened 20% behind its predecessor, when sequels usually open bigger (and then run out of steam faster) than the earlier films.  It’s likely to make only $75-80M in the US, and […]

STUDIO SCORECARD. 20th Century Fox vaulted ahead of Paramount into fourth place in worldwide box office for 2013 to date, mostly because of The Wolverine.  Universal and Warner Brothers remain a very close #2 and #3, respectively, with both studios grossing well over $100 million this past week (primarily from overseas grosses for Universal’s Despicable Me […]

  Yesterday we looked at some of the ways that the costs of producing a feature film are higher and more complicated than they might seem.  Today, some additional obstacles that lie between any movie and profitability.   These may be the most important and least-understood part of profitability calculations.  Every entity that distributes a […]

> With one startling exception and a couple of smaller ones, the holiday crop of movies declined on Saturday and are expected to recover on New Year’s Day. PARAMOUNT:  MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL went down 18% and is expected to rise 33% today.  It should hit $142M by the end of the 4-day holiday […]

>Thor appears to be headed for a solid opening but not enough to push the weekend up versus last year (when Iron Man 2 opened huge).  Two other openers, both romantic comedies, should have minimal impact. Opening at over 3,500 theaters, Thor should average a very good $19,000 per theater (for $67 million total).  Although […]

  OPENINGS:  JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL (Columbia/Sony) successfully rode its strategy of arriving in theatres ahead of The Rise of Skywalker to a $60.1M weekend, far ahead of the $36.2M opening weekend for the last Jumanji (although that had a different release pattern, opening on the Wednesday between that year’s Star Wars installment and Christmas […]

>The weekend studio estimates (based on Friday and Saturday actuals and projections for Sunday) are coming in about the same as the weekend numbers posted yesterday (based on Friday actuals only).  The box office volume for the top 12 films is now looking like $110 million for the weekend, down 6% from last year’s weekend […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.   Scroll down for domestic and overseas grosses for each film individually so far in 2014. YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2014 is still running -5% behind last year and -3% below the average for this point the past four years ($8.058 billion).  Over the same […]