OPENINGS:  THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (Warners/MGM) had a better Saturday hold than last year’s An Unexpected Journey (-22% vs. -25%), suggesting that positive word of mouth is kicking in, and no doubt easing the minds of Warners executives.  The studio’s $73.7M weekend estimate still puts it 13% below Journey‘s start, but if […]

  HOLDOVERS:  Pandemic box office champion SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME (Marvel/Columbia/Sony) had no trouble keeping its throne over New Year’s weekend, down 38% to $52.7M, with a running US total of $609.9M.  The January ahead is sparse on competition, so the film should top $700M, which will make it the #2 MCU title in the […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #23 of 2015 looks like $128 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a little worse than it looked yesterday and down significantly the norm for this weekend as the lame summer continues.   Opening at 3,711 theaters Friday, Spy from Fox is now on track for a $30.0 million opening three-day weekend (below […]

  OPENINGS:  TOM & JERRY (Warners, also on HBO Max) had a solid opening for this moment in time with $13.7M, an especially impressive number since the movie is available at no extra cost to anyone with an HBO Max subscription.  If Tom & Jerry can have the kind of sustained run that other family […]

  OPENINGS:  OVERBOARD (MGM/Pantelion/Lionsgate) opened in 45% more theatres than Eugenio Derbez’s How To Be A Latin Lover, and had a weekend that was 20% higher at $14.8M.  That’s not the cross-cultural breakout hit that the studio and Derbez had in mind, although an eventual $40M in the US will likely provide a modest profit […]

  OPENINGS:  Although BLUE BEETLE (DC/Warners) won the weekend over a tiring Barbie, it landed at the low end of expectations with $25.4M–and given the heavy 15% Friday-to-Saturday drop (much steeper than the 4%/6% drops for the Shazam movies), not to mention the Sunday West Coast weather, that studio estimate may be optimistic.  The international […]

  OPENINGS:  With the LA movie theatre market now open (at 25% capacity) and a general rise in vaccinations, the box office seems to be taking its first very tentative steps back to pre-pandemic life.  The one wide opening of the weekend THE COURIER (Roadside) wasn’t at all impressive at a $2M start, but the […]

The weekend looks like a mediocre $82 million for the top 12 films, a little softer than it looked yesterday (now slightly lagging the multi-year average for this weekend).  Argo continues to do well, as we expected, but the four openers all did even worse than our conservative predictions in Wednesday’s ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Forecast. The ShowbuzzDaily Domestic Final estimates […]