> The Martin Luther King holiday weekend, a relatively small one for Hollywood because many people work on Monday, begins. UNIVERSAL: The studio made the fairly extraordinary decision to sit out the holiday movie season entirely, presumably because they didn’t think any of their product could compete.  They did, however, spend a lot of money […]

> Maybe JOHN CARTER should have starred Jonah Hill. OPENINGS:  21 JUMP STREET (Sony) got off to a great start, with a $13.1M Friday that should get it to around $35M for the weekend.  Expect a quick announcement that a sequel script is in development.  Although the movie’s success is of course great for Hill, […]

> Despite all Universal‘s efforts to imprint audiences with the idea that THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT is some kind of quasi-sequel to Bridesmaids (it’s not), preliminary numbers at Deadline show the movie to be underperforming badly.  Its $3.7M Friday was only in 3rd place for the day, well below the $6M opening day the same creative […]

And now the waiting game begins for Team Metcalf.  With all but one movie now open, the Metcalf slate now totals almost $1.1 billion to date, with a little but of upside remaining in Madagascar 3 and to some extent Prometheus. Team Salem’s top two films open very soon:  Brave from Pixar this Friday and Amazing Spider-Man […]

Before next weekend’s arrival of a bona fide hit, The Dark Knight Rises, this weekend was highlighted by a bit of a summer movie poser: Ice Age: Continental Drift (an estimated $46.0 million opening weekend, missing our forecast in Wednesday’s ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Predictions), looking less like a summer movie that should be given a weekend […]

  Let’s start with something simple:  anyone who claims to have reliable knowledge about the profitability of a specific film, without having detailed access to its production budgets, financing documents and key talent agreements (virtually all confidential), misleads themselves and their readers. The financing and accounting of films is probably more complicated now than it’s […]

In the battle for second place in the ShowbuzzDaily Summer Movie Draft, very little changed the past week.  Team Weil’s slate tacked on $41.6 million the past seven days, while Team Salem added $40.9 million.  Weil remains $69 million ahead of Salem ($1.004 billion to $935 million for the entire summer). In the next week […]

Two films had big very large gains overseas the past week: Resident Evil: Retribution (up $53 million to $103 million overseas to date) and Expendables 2 (up $28 million since last week to $186 million overseas to date).  The fifth in the Resident Evil series now stands at an estimated $145 million worldwide, with at least another $100 million in upside […]