> Rio‘s domestic opening is a little soft, but the film has the advantage of facing no animated competition (aside from the minor Hoodwinked Too) until Kung Fu Panda 2 opens May 27. Plus it has its gangbuster foreign grosses to keep it warm. There is a great horror movie boxoffice story this season… Insidious, […]

  SAN ANDREAS (Village Roadshow/Warners) is off to a mid-range start, with preliminary Friday numbers at Deadline giving it a $17.5M opening day (including $3.1M from Thursday night), which is slightly ahead of the $16.6M opening day of Mad Max: Fury Road.  No one really cares that its likely $45M weekend will be Dwayne Johnson’s […]

  For the fourth consecutive weekend, an animated movie will lead the box office, as Finding Dory‘s mantle is taken by THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS (Illumination/Universal).  With a $38M Friday (including $5.3M from Thursday night) reported in preliminary numbers at Deadline, Pets is on track for a $95M weekend, which would make it the […]

Weekend #51 of 2015 is looking like an amazing $281 million for the top 12 films this weekend, reminiscent of another historic weekend six years ago (see comparisons below). Star Wars: The Force Awakens from Disney should open with $225 million Friday-Sunday. The film is on track for around $720 million domestic in its run. Overseas the film could bring in $1.2 billion, […]

  This may be a good time to pause the stories about Disney’s infalliability, and the unstoppable dominance of the Star Wars franchise.  SOLO (Lucasfilm/Disney) is underperforming in a big way, with preliminary numbers at Deadline putting its opening day at $36.5M, extremely frontloaded with $14.1M of that total from Thursday night.  That’s the lowest […]

  OPENINGS:  We’ll see how the numbers hold up in tomorrow’s finals, but for now at least THE BOSS BABY (DreamWorks Animation/20th) is the weekend winner with $49M, considerably better than expectations.  The only dour note on the success is that it was rather frontloaded for a family non-sequel, with a 28% Saturday bump.  That […]

The Weekly Box Office Predictions feature is on hiatus.

  WONDER WOMAN (RatPac/Wanda/Ten Cent/DC/Warners) is proving to be exactly what its studio–and the summer box office in general–needed.  For Warners, it’s giving the embattled DC mega-franchise its first taste of critical praise since the days of The Dark Knight, which is important in itself, and that’s paying off in ticket sales.  Preliminary numbers at […]