Thor: The Dark World has pushed Disney back into first place in the worldwide box office race, pushing Warner Brothers back into second place and Universal into third. For a complete ranking of 2013 films by worldwide performance click here. TOTAL NORTH AMERICAN BOX OFFICE. Looking at wide-release films in North America (those that play on […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Year to date, Warner Brothers has moved well ahead of its competing studios, thanks to two bona fide hits to balance two strikeouts.  Sony and Universal, the next level down each with around $450 million worldwide to date, has a similar hit and miss ratio to Warner Brothers, but the hits are […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Big Hero 6 has pushed Disney into a solid second place, giving it some distance from #3 Warner Brothers.  Interstellar has allowed Paramount to pull into 4th place, passing Sony and drawing fairly close to Warner Brothers (with Paramount boasting a much higher hit-to-miss ration than Warner Brothers has).   Scroll down for domestic and […]

  OPENINGS:  When studios trot out “bad weather” as their excuse for an underwhelming opening, it’s the industry equivalent of citing a homework-eating dog–and this week, it’s particularly clear that the inclement conditions that supposedly affected FOCUS (RatPac Dune/Warners) didn’t interfere at all with the holdovers that performed very strongly over the past 3 days.  […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.   YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2015 to date is now +8% above last year and still +5% above the average for this point the past four years ($5.560 billion).  Over the same period, Hollywood films have grossed almost $15.2 billion worldwide when we add overseas box office (that’s now […]

  OPENINGS:  LOVE THE COOPERS (CBS/Lionsgate) was the best of a bad bunch, launching with $8.4M.  That’s 30% less than the $12.5M start of 2005’s The Family Stone, but the studio can take some solace from the fact that Stone (which opened closer to Christmas) earned a 5x multiple from its opening weekend.  If Coopers […]

  OPENINGS:  The Saturday bump for 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (Bad Robot/Paramount) was 8%, a solid number for its genre that indicates good word of mouth.  That gave it a $25.3M weekend, a bit higher than Friday indicated, although still not where it might have gotten had the Cloverfield connection (or relative lack thereof) been clearer.  […]

  OPENINGS:  The economics for FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM (Warners) will probably put the film at $600-700M worldwide against roughly $350M in costs.  That’s a profitable place to be, although not quite as strong as Suicide Squad, which has reached $745.6M worldwide on similar costs.  For the weekend, Warners is predicting $75M in […]