OPENINGS:  We noted here yesterday that if THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) could just hold on as well on its first Saturday as The Hunger Games had, a $160M weekend was within its grasp.  That’s exactly what happened, with the same 25% Saturday drop for Catching Fire that Hunger Games had and a $161.1M weekend […]

> The summer movie season is starting with a bang:  according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, THE AVENGERS (Disney) is off to a $70M opening day.  If that number holds, it’ll be the #4 opening day of all time, behind only the final Harry Potter and 2 Twilights, and slightly ahead of, among others, The […]

  MONDAY UPDATE:  Father’s Day was a holiday, all right… for some movies.  22 JUMP STREET vastly overestimated its appeal to dads, taking a sizable 30% hit on Sunday and falling an ugly $3M below its original weekend number to $57.1M.  HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 was also a bit weaker than expected, down […]

  Note:  because last Friday was part of a holiday weekend, the week-to-week declines for holdovers are unusually heavy.  That will modify over the course of the weekend, since the holiday box office was already tailing off by last Friday. TAKEN 3 (Europa/20th) had no problem taking over the box office reins from the holiday […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #29 of 2014 looks like $129 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, -30% below the norm for this weekend and below our forecast ($147 million).  This is the fifth really sub-par weekend in a row. Opening at 2,805 theaters, The Purge: Anarchy from Universal grossed $13.0 million through Friday and […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has preliminary boxoffice numbers for Friday, and early indications are good for IMMORTALS, which appears to have already earned $13.5-14M (including $1.4M from Thursday midnight screenings).  That should get it to an overperforming $33-35M for the weekend.  A couple of cautions about these extrapolations, though:  Friday was Veterans Day, which means […]

  All this summer’s box office needed for burial was a shovel, and Hollywood provided that with a Labor Day line-up devoid of any genuinely wide new releases.  The result is going to be ugly, except for a few hardy holdovers. The widest release of the weekend isn’t new at all:  it’s the one-week 901-theatre […]

>The monolith that is TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON has started its weekend.  With a combination of 9PM shows (that were supposedly all in 3D) and midnights, reports are that the picture made $13.5M last night.  This is considerably less than the $16M for midnight Transformers 2 shows, although more than the original Transformers ($8.8M […]