Weekend #3 of 2015 is looking like $134 million for the top 12 films this weekend, up from the norm for this weekend but down from the same weekend last year. Opening at around 3,200 theaters Friday (above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), American Sniper from Warner Brothers should average a solid $8,800 per theater for the […]

  OPENINGS:  INSIDE OUT (Pixar/Disney) had the largest opening for an animated non-sequel ever at $91.1M.  (Disney is claiming a slightly more abstract record as well, the largest opening for a film that isn’t based on any preexisting source material–excluding The Hunger Games, for example, because it began as a book–but the animation record will […]

  Labor Day weekend is always the exhausted last gasp of the summer movie season, but this year the studios didn’t even try.  Partly it’s the effect of August having generally been a disaster in 2015 (last year’s 4-day Labor Day span featured a $22.9M 5th weekend for Guardians of the Galaxy and $15.6M from […]

There was enough product at the multiplexes to make for a solid Thanksgiving weekend total, but holiday fireworks were absent. OPENINGS:  THE GOOD DINOSAUR (Pixar/Disney) had a $39.2M weekend ($55.6M since its Wednesday opening), putting it behind Frozen ($67.4M), Toy Story 2 ($57.4M) and Tangled ($48.8M) among Thanksgiving openings.  It continues to run closest to […]

  OPENINGS:  RISEN (Affirm/Columbia/Sony) topped the weekend’s arrivals with an $11.8M start that was above the $11.4M for War Room and the $9.2M for God’s Not Dead, although it was well below Heaven Is For Real‘s $22.5M.  The Christian genre has tremendous multiples–both God’s and War Room ended up at 6x their opening weekends–and Risen […]

Weekend #22 of 2016 forecasts for films opening wide and major returning films: NEW FILMS THIS WEEKEND May 27-29, 2016 Critics Positive ($ millions) Opening Weekend Forecast Fri-Mon Forecast Domestic Total Projection Overseas Total Projection Worldwide Total Projection X-Men: Apocalypse Fox PG13 52% 68.5 85.2 195 550 745 Alice Through the Looking Glass Dis PG […]

  OPENINGS:  GET OUT (QC/Blumhouse/Universal) had a remarkable Saturday performance for a horror movie, rising 17% in a genre that usually drops sharply on its 2d day of release.  That’s better than the 13% bump for Day 2 of Split, and also better than the 14% increase for Insidious, one of the leggiest of recent horror […]

  Its studio did everything in its corporate power to keep the quality of TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (Huahua/Paramount) from infecting ticket sales, preventing any reviews from appearing until the projectors had started on the movie’s first paid screenings.  But audiences knew what was coming, and in the US, Transformers 5 will be by far […]