A few notes:  this week’s newcomers opened along a range of dates, including Tuesday night, Wednesday, Friday night and Saturday, and those scheduling decisions had an affect on the totals below.  Also, the fact that Friday was Christmas Eve lowered the day’s ticket sales, probably by 30% or so.  (Something similar will apply to […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #7 of 2015 looks like a terrific $196 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, well above the norms for this weekend and even better than it looked yesterday ($188 million estimate based on Friday’s grosses).   Opening at 3,646 theaters Friday, Fifty Shades of Grey from Focus/ Universal is on […]

  OPENINGS:  INSIDE OUT 2 (Pixar/Disney) overdelivered massively compared to expectations with $155M in the US, a remarkable $65M higher than the start for 2015’s original Inside Out, and depending whether you count the “live-action” CG remake of The Lion King ($191.8M) as animated, either the #2 or #3 US opening for an animated feature […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #27 of 2014 looks like $118 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, even worse than the $126 million estimate yesterday, now 31% below the norm for this weekend, and well below the $153.2 million weekend for the top 12 the last time July 4 fell on a […]

  OPENINGS:  LYLE LYLE CROCODILE (Columbia/Sony) arrived below expectations at $11.5M (it might reach $13.4M with the Monday holiday), unable to take advantage of the 11-week gap since the last major family movie opened.  It has more than a month until Strange World claims that audience, but even with strong holds, it still may not […]

>The weekend studio estimates (based on Friday and Saturday actuals and projections for Sunday) are coming in slightly above the weekend numbers posted yesterday (based on Friday actuals only).  The box office volume for the top 12 films is now looking like $123.5 million for the weekend, up 2% from last year’s weekend but up […]

> The weekend studio projections (Friday and Saturday actual numbers plus a studio-generated estimate for Sunday’s business) are very similar to the early look at the weekend from yesterday.  Hop will lead the way, with Arthur and Hanna battling out for second place (a race that could go down to the wire Monday morning with […]

  OPENINGS:  The studio-reported $28.5M weekend for Tim Burton’s MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN (TSG/20th) is below the $29.7M opening for Burton’s flop Dark Shadows.  Miss Peregrine cost less than Shadows, which will help (reportedly by about $40M), but this is still not much more than a breakeven proposition on a fairly large investment […]