OPENINGS:  Things didn’t get better for ALLEGIANT (Summit/Lionsgate) as the weekend went on.  Its $29.1M opening was down an awful 44% from the $52.3M for Insurgent, and with massive competition arriving next week and word of mouth that’s likely to be terrible, it may struggle to get past $75M in the US.  As we […]

>Summer always ends with a whimper.  While Memorial Day and Independence Day weekends are among the strongest of the box office year, Labor Day weekend is usually the lowest of the year in terms of movie-going.  This weekend features the opening of three more duds: a “found footage” space thriller, a shark bloodfest, and a […]

  Although it’s possible for a horror or action movie to make some money over Labor Day weekend, no studio opens a movie it cares about for the holiday that repels moviegoers.  This weekend’s openings won’t change that rule.  THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS (DreamWorks/Reliant/Participant/Touchstone/Disney) was probably envisioned as an awards-worthy project when it was originally […]

  OPENINGS:  Kevin Hart has been hanging around the edges of being a movie star for a few years now, and RIDE ALONG (Universal) makes it official.  With a $14.5M Friday start, it could challenge Cloverfield for the Martin Luther King weekend title, currently at $46.1M.  For Universal, this is the start of a nicely […]

  OPENINGS:  KONG: SKULL ISLAND (Legendary/Tencent/Warners) is playing as a quasi-family movie, perhaps in response to the R-rated Logan and Get Out.  That gave it a much more muscular Saturday than similar big-budget monster movies, up 19% on Saturday where Godzilla fell 16% and Pacific Rim dropped 13%.  With that boost, Kong should hit its […]

  OPENINGS:  The $35.4M weekend result for SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (Sony Animation/Columbia/Sony) was in keeping with its Friday projections, and the expectation is that it will thrive through the holidays.  Its 3% Saturday bump, though, which is low for a family animated movie (The Grinch jumped 47% on its 2nd day of release) but […]

Weekend #6 of 2015 is looking like $108 million for the top 12 films this weekend, well below the normal volume for this weekend ($133 million). Opening at around 3,500 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water from Paramount should average […]

  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 […]