OPENINGS: The male 18-34 demo was again at the center of the box office, largely fueling the $23.5M start for JACKASS FOREVER (Paramount), not quite at the level of the last product of the franchise, 2013’s Bad Grandpa, and its $32.1M start, but more than enough to ensure profitability at its low cost point. […]
OPENINGS: HALLOWEEN ENDS (Universal, also on Peacock) underperformed badly with $41.3M, about 25% below pre-release expectations, and 17% under the $49.4M start for last year’s Halloween Kills, despite a stronger Thursday night start than Kills ($5.4M vs $4.9M). The excuse de jour is the Peacock release, which would be dubious in any case considering […]
OPENINGS: NO HARD FEELINGS (Columbia/Sony) slightly exceeded tracking expectations with $15.1M, but those expectations were themselves quite low. With production and worldwide marketing costs in the neighborhood of $100M, the film will need to hold strongly for the next several weeks to reach any profit, and while it has the hard-R comedy field to […]
OPENINGS: CIVIL WAR (A24) marked its studio’s biggest swing to date, with costs that will approach $100M for production and worldwide marketing. (A24 limited its risk by pre-selling some overseas territories to subdistributors.) The early results were promising, with a studio-record $25.7M weekend, alhough tepid audience surveys and the fact that the audience was […]
> The tiny 3% drop in PUSS IN BOOTS‘ second weekend is truly remarkable, and could well lead to studios adopting DreamWorks’ strategy in the future of opening an animated movie on Halloween weekend and then having a de facto 2d opening the following week. (However, the picture is still running $13M below Megamind‘s 10 […]
All boxoffice figures are unofficial until tomorrow, when the studios will once again admit that they’re in a business designed to make money. However, numbers have made their way to the outside world, and it seems clear that as midsummer Saturdays go, yesterday was slower than usual, probably by a factor of 10-20% virtually […]
The Super Bowl will take a chunk out of everyone today, the only Sunday that plays like a Monday with 60-70% drops from Saturday across the board. That’s why the studios, for the most part, stay away. OPENINGS: Given that fact, WARM BODIES (Summit/Lionsgate) did fairly well with a $20M weekend (that includes $500K […]
OPENINGS: THE CONJURING (Warners) behaved like a horror movie on Saturday, falling 18% despite the great reviews and exit polls, but that didn’t stand in the way of its estimated huge $41.5M weekend. That made it the biggest non-sequel R-rated horror movie ever, and bigger than all the thrillers Warners released under its now-defunct […]