The summer movie season is officially underway, just in time for us to finish our look at the line-ups and prospects for each of the big studios.  That brings us to Paramount Pictures, the least busy but hardly the quietest of the group.  Our previous examinations: Sony Universal Warner Bros 20th Century Fox Disney […]

  (Note:  Most of the studios aggressively estimated their Sunday declines as being around 10%, even though last year’s Memorial Day Weekend Sunday drops were mostly steeper than that, so there could be a number of downward adjustments in store when final numbers are released.) OPENINGS:  X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (20th), oddly enough, was […]

  As holidays go, the 4th of July isn’t a bright one for moviegoing, and when it falls on a Friday, the result is a weekend no better than usual (the days before and after compensate for the holiday itself).  That held true this year as well, especially because the other studios showed more deference […]

  The odds are strong that on Sunday morning, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (Paramount) will claim a $100M weekend, the first of 2014–but we won’t really know until Monday whether the movie has hit that mark.  According to reports at Deadline and elsewhere, Transformers 4 fell sharply on Saturday from its $41.6M opening day, in the […]

  OPENINGS:  Despite all the testosterone flowing through the Avengers-verse, the biggest star to emerge from the mega-franchise is turning out to be Scarlett Johansson, the latest warrior woman at the front of the box office.  This weekend she’s doing what Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth haven’t been able to pull off:  launch an unrelated […]

  At the beginning of the month, the success of Guardians of the Galaxy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was prompting some to excitedly conclude that the box office year was now truly 52 weeks long.  But the second half of August remains a lousy time to launch a movie, a fact that’s being borne […]

Weekend #39 of 2014 is looking like $97 million for the top 12 films this weekend, up 3% from the norm for this weekend. Opening at around 3,234 theaters Friday (above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), The Equalizer from Sony should average a solid $10,600 per theater for the […]

  OUIJA (Universal) had about the same hold on Saturday as Annabelle did 3 weeks ago, down 9% (in this case to $7.5M), according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, and that should be enough to get it to $20M for the weekend, easily enough for the win against little fresh competition. Ouija isn’t close to […]