> The new 3D action-fest IMMORTALS got off to a reasonably good start with $1.4M in Thursday midnight screenings.  This isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s slightly higher than the $1.3M RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES made in its midnight runs, and far better than the $550K pulled in last week by A VERY […]

  OPENINGS:  David Cronenberg is a venerated filmmaker, but not a source of many box office hits:  in a career that spans more than 4 decades, his highest-grossing film in the US is still 1986’s The Fly at $40.5M (a little over $100M adjusted for inflation).  That won’t change with his brooding and frequently grotesque […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Updated look at 2016 by studio.   YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2016 to date is now +3% above last year and now +4% above the average for this point the past four years ($6.388 billion).  Over the same period, Hollywood films have grossed $16.7 billion worldwide when […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #46 of 2014 looks like $128 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, down 33% the norm for this weekend ($191 million) but up slightly (+7%) from the same weekend last year. Opening at 3,154 theaters, Dumb and Dumber To from Universal grossed $14.2 million Friday and is on track for a $36.0 […]

  Hollywood bounced back swiftly from last weekend’s Halloween doldrums, thanks to a pair of A-level openings.  INTERSTELLAR (Par/Warners) is in line for a win on Friday, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, with up to $18M.  The Interstellar numbers are a bit tangled, because for the first part of Thursday, it showed in 249 […]

  We’re now just over 10 days from the 12:01AM July 20 launch of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the summer’s last mammoth movie event, and The Hollywood Reporter has provided the first hard information about the epic’s prerelease tracking.  Not surprisingly, it’s through the roof, slightly below or above (depending on the metric used) the […]

  OPENINGS:  GET OUT (QC/Blumhouse/Universal) had a remarkable Saturday performance for a horror movie, rising 17% in a genre that usually drops sharply on its 2d day of release.  That’s better than the 13% bump for Day 2 of Split, and also better than the 14% increase for Insidious, one of the leggiest of recent horror […]

The 2014 holiday box office has pulled even with 2013 and remains somewhat above the average for the last decade or so. The top 10 films on Friday January 2, 2015 totaled a solid $51.9 million, somewhat above the average $48.7 million for the days since 2002 when this date landed on a weekend.  When […]