OPENINGS: The summer saga of underperforming franchise titles continued with WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (TSG/20th), with a $56.5M start that’s 22% below the $72.6M opening for Dawn 3 years ago, and just barely ahead of the $54.8M for 2011’s Rise (despite costing $60M more to produce than Rise). Even with rave […]
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 […]
The two openers this weekend will be forgotten in several days or weeks, while Oblivion has a good chance of staying at #1 in its second weekend and 42 will be the other holdover still above the significant $10 million weekend mark. But that’s about it for the box office. The top 12 films this […]
OPENINGS: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (Paramount) was an experiment in several ways–the first installment of the franchise to be a spin-off and not a direct sequel, the first released out of the Halloween season, and one of Hollywood’s first tries at producing and marketing a movie primarily to the Latino audience. All of […]
OPENINGS: The major studios took the weekend off in anticipation of next week’s The Batman overwhelming the market. STUDIO 666 (Open Road) didn’t find much of a crowd for its Foo Fighters horror with a $1.6M weekend, and it probably won’t reach $10M in the US. CYRANO (UA/MGM) may have outsmarted itself, scheduled for […]
Most films will rise this weekend compared to last week, simply because New Year’s Eve is a bigger moviegoing occasion than Christmas Eve. Generally, box office should rise 20% or so on Saturday, drop around 30% on Sunday, then jump 30-40% on New Year’s Day. The first two weekends of 2018 should feature relatively […]
OPENINGS: STAR TREK BEYOND (Skydance/Alibaba/Huahua/Paramount) had a tepid start, claiming a $59.6M opening weekend in the US. Even if that number holds (it includes an extremely aggressive Sunday estimate), it would be 20% below the $75..2M 2009 franchise reboot, and even below the $70.2M earned by Star Trek Into Darkness, which opened on 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 […]