OPENINGS:  Saturday showed an 18% drop for FAST & FURIOUS 6 (Universal), but really the number was better than it looked, because “Friday” included $6.5M from Thursday night.  With that factored out, the movie held almost dead even on Saturday, and should be headed for a $120M+ 4-day weekend, easily the 4th best Memorial […]

STUDIO SCORECARD. In the worldwide studio rankings for 2013 to date, the weekly changes look much higher than normal.  Most of those increases are a function of some September films not being fully counted in the yearly totals for the past few weeks.  All of the 2013 films are properly accounted for now. Warner Brothers […]

As we continue to tally the films released wide in 2013, Disney has pulled to within $1 million of Warner Brothers in worldwide box office for the year (out of over $9 billion between the rival studios).  Disney continues to benefit mightily from Frozen, which has now surpassed The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug worldwide.  For a complete ranking of […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  The release of X-Men: Days of Future Past has pushed 20th Century Fox to the top of the heap with over $1.5 billion in worldwide box office in 2014 to date.  The race will ebb and flow through the rest of the summer and into the holiday season, but Fox, Warner Brothers and Sony […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Fox expanded its lead with $147 million worldwide this week, mostly from the release of The Maze Runner, pushing the studio to over $3.8 billion worldwide for the year to date.  Disney is in second with $2.6 billion, and Warner Brothers remains in third place with almost $2.5 billion.  In the chart below […]

  OPENINGS:  Here’s a telling stat for TOMORROWLAND (Disney):  although the movie was aimed squarely at a family audience, only 30% of the people who showed up were in that demo.  Instead, 60% of the audience was over 25, meaning the older George Clooney fans.  That suggests that Disney marketing wasn’t able to get the […]

  OPENINGS:  HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 (Columbia/Sony) has set a new September record with a $47.5M opening (beating the first Hotel‘s $42.5M), and it barely missed becoming Adam Sandler’s biggest opening ever (The Longest Yard currently has a tiny lead at $47.6M, and kudos to Sony for not claiming the record and changing its mind tomorrow […]

  OPENINGS:  The east coast blizzard seems to have had less effect on the weekend box office than one might have assumed, considering that all the newcomers went up from Friday to Saturday, even though they were in typically front-loaded genres.  Their studio estimates have them bunched within a narrow $825K range for the weekend, […]