OPENINGS:  Note that the entire market in the US will be hit by Super Bowl Sunday, which will be down from Saturday by roughly double the percentage of the usual Saturday-Sunday drop.  (However, Hollywood will hope for a Valentine’s Day bump the following day.)  Even with that included in the calculations, though, the weekend’s […]

  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 […]

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 […]

  Half a dozen films entered wide release over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, and none of them is likely to chart higher than 5th place, most ranging from major disappointments to outright disasters. The most unpleasant surprise may be PATRIOTS DAY (CBS/Lionsgate), a piece of populist history with Mark Wahlberg in the lead […]

  OPENINGS:  HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 3: SUMMER VACATION (Sony Animation/Columbia/Sony) clocked in with a reliable $44.1M weekend, just about midway between the first Transylvania‘s $42.5M and the second’s $48.5M.  (Sticklers might note that this the first of the franchise to feature Thursday night screenings, giving it a slightly longer “weekend”.)  There are some other family movies […]

  OPENINGS:  The east coast blizzard seems to have had less effect on the weekend box office than one might have assumed, considering that all the newcomers went up from Friday to Saturday, even though they were in typically front-loaded genres.  Their studio estimates have them bunched within a narrow $825K range for the weekend, […]

Weekend #5 of 2015 is looking like $104 million for the top 12 films this weekend, actually well above the normal volume for this weekend ($77 million), which is hobbled by the Super Bowl and its massive television audience.  American Sniper on Friday and Saturday should salvage the weekend somewhat, but there is very little […]

  The major studios are barely participating in late August distribution, and it was clear the box office would be dreadful this weekend even before calculating the effects of Hurricane Harvey and the expected massive pay-per-view gate for Saturday’s Mayweather vs. McGregor bout.  (Those events are likely to bring down weekend multiples even lower than […]