The 48th weekend of the year is looking like $164 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, well below the normal pace for a normal Thanksgiving weekend. Opening at 3,742 theaters Wednesday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Frozen (3D) from Disney should average $12,200 per theater for the weekend […]

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 […]

  OPENINGS:  We’ll find out tomorrow if the studio’s $100.2M US weekend estimate for THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS (Universal), which counts on an influx of post-church Easter Sunday Christians, will slip into double figures.  But even if the number holds, it’s down 32% from the Furious 7 opening.  If Universal’s hypothesis that this decline […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD (Columbia/Sony), the summer’s great adult-oriented, non-franchise, auteur/movie star hope, had a solid start per preliminary numbers at Deadline with a $16.7M opening day (including $5.8M from Thursday night).  That’s the biggest opening of Quentin Tarantino’s career, higher than the $14.4M for Inglourious Basterds and the $15M for Django […]

  OPENINGS:  Just about everything about the release of TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR (Variance/AMC Theaters) has been unique, and that includes the fact that the theater chain, a first-time distributor, has announced the weekend box office as $95-97M for now, with a definite number to be issued tomorrow.  Even at the high end, that’s […]

  OPENINGS:  January is often welcoming to low-budget horror, but that didn’t help THE DAMNED (Vertical), which found $800K at 732 theaters, a meager $1100 weekend per-theater average. HOLDOVERS:  Flooding the holiday zone with family entertainments worked out very well for the studios, which had a quartet of bona fide smash hits between Thanksgiving and […]

The 20th weekend of the year is looking like $158 million for the top 12 films, a little better than average for this weekend over the past few years but much better than the same weekend last year, which featured the opening of the one of the greatest clunkers/ punchlines/ punching bags ever: Battleship from […]

Weekend #28 of 2012 looks fairly soft: $159 million for the top 12 films, down 37% from last year’s comparable weekend (the opening of the last Harry Potter — talk about a high bar) and down 23% from the four-year average for the weekend. Opening at around 3,800 theaters, Ice Age: Continental Drift from 20th Century […]