This feature will return next week. ###

  NOTE:  THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED THROUGHOUT TO REFLECT OFFICIAL STUDIO ESTIMATES FOR THURSDAY. As is customary during Christmas-New Year’s week, the majority of the holiday movies stayed fairly stable on Thursday, varying only a few hundred thousand dollars from the day before.  The major exception, based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, was LES […]

  OPENINGS:  ALIEN: COVENANT (TSG/20th) slumped almost as badly on its 2d day of release as the unpopular Prometheus (22% vs 25%), and the result was a lackluster $36M weekend in the US–and even that number includes an aggressive estimate for Sunday.  Worse yet, with Covenant now playing in every major international market except China […]

>Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax joins the worldwide box office chart this week, already ranked #7 out of 45 films released the last three months, but that ranking is based on a current zero tally of overseas receipts.   Based on recent animated films, we would expect The Lorax to gross somewhat more than its domestic […]

  Veterans Day isn’t considered one of the major Hollywood holidays, but this year it provided some 3-day weekends that boosted Friday numbers (although that may catch up with some totals over the weekend and when next week is compared to it). The other note for the weekend is that all three of the major […]

>The year to-date box office tally picked up some ground versus last year with the past week running 12% ahead of the same week last year.  The actual weekend openings for Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and Happy Feet Two came in somewhat below the studio projections issued Sunday.          The Past Week: […]

No changes in the studio rankings this week, but four studios had $100+ million weeks: Paramount (with the release of Anchorman 2), Disney (the release of Saving Mr. Banks and continued international strength of Frozen), Sony (the release of American Hustle) and Warner Brothers (continued overseas prowess of The Hobbit despite a reduction in the domestic projection for the film).  For a […]

  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 […]