> $59.99 for home VOD — Genius! Box office normally starts to pick up when the calendar turns to November, moving from $90-100 million per weekend through most of October to $120 million or more per weekend in early November (building toward $185 million or more for the Friday-Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend).  Last year’s first […]

  OPENINGS:  BOO 2! A MADEA HALLOWEEN (Lionsgate) took the weekend with $21.7M, down 24% from last year’s first Boo.  That puts it behind all the previous Madea openings except A Madea Christmas, which had the entire holiday corridor for its run.  Last year’s installment had an exceptionally good Weekend 2 hold, down just 40% […]

  The weekend looks highly promising for THE CONJURING (Warners), which haunted up $3.3M in screenings that began 7PM on Thursday night.  Although other summer openings have had similar mid-$3M starts (including The Great Gatsby and World War Z), the closest analogue here is probably the $3.4M earned by low-budget The Purge in its Thursday […]

  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:  THE MEG (Gravity/Warners) had a fair hold on Saturday, down 2%, which brought it to a $44.5M weekend.  That’s 83% better than Skyscraper‘s start, and 27% better than Rampage, and with no new direct competition next weekend, The Meg could reach $125M in the US.  However, the mega-B-movie had a reported $300M+ in […]

OPENINGS:  TERRIFIER 3 (Cineverse) broke through to a mainstream audience with an $18.3M weekend, which is more than the entire $10.6M run of 2022’s Terrifier 2 (that one’s highest weekend was $1.9M).  The new entry in the unrated, ultra-violent slasher series accomplished this with not just a low production budget, but reportedly a miniscule amount […]

Weekend #4 of 2014 is looking like $107 million for the top 12 films, up 7% from the average for this weekend the past few years. Opening at around 2,700 theaters Friday (slightly below the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), I, Frankenstein from Lionsgate/Summit should average a mediocre $5,800 per theater for the […]

[UPDATE: The predictions for the films opening this weekend have been revised, reflecting corrections to some key computations.] Weekend #43 of 2014 is looking like $100 million $109 million for the top 12 films this weekend, up 23% from the norm for this weekend. Opening at around 2,700 theaters Friday (just below the 2,886 average theater […]