OPENINGS:  BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (DC/RatPac/Warners) weathered a 38% Saturday drop and is currently estimating a $170.1M weekend.  That would make it Warners’ #1 US opening ever, beating the final Harry Potter‘s $169.2M, but that includes an aggressive Easter Sunday estimate, so it may fall behind by tomorrow.  (Depending on how that […]

  OPENINGS:  Things didn’t get better for ALLEGIANT (Summit/Lionsgate) as the weekend went on.  Its $29.1M opening was down an awful 44% from the $52.3M for Insurgent, and with massive competition arriving next week and word of mouth that’s likely to be terrible, it may struggle to get past $75M in the US.  As we […]

  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 weekend belonged to ZOOTOPIA (Disney Animation/Disney), which broke its studio unit’s opening record and the March animation record with $73.7M, and also earned $63.4M internationally (including $24M from China) to give it a worldwide total, counting early foreign openings, of $232.5M, with plenty of road ahead, and only The Little Prince as […]

  OPENINGS:  The really bad news for GODS OF EGYPT (Summit/Lionsgate) wasn’t the $14M US opening, although that was certainly pathetic enough.  No, the really bad news was that in 68 overseas territories covering most of the world (although not yet China, which opens in 2 weeks, nor France, Germany or the UK), it managed […]

  OPENINGS:  RISEN (Affirm/Columbia/Sony) topped the weekend’s arrivals with an $11.8M start that was above the $11.4M for War Room and the $9.2M for God’s Not Dead, although it was well below Heaven Is For Real‘s $22.5M.  The Christian genre has tremendous multiples–both God’s and War Room ended up at 6x their opening weekends–and Risen […]

  A Valentine’s Day in the middle of Presidents Day weekend allowed for strong Sunday studio estimates–in one case, suspiciously so. OPENINGS:  A couple of notable sidelights to the gargantuan success of DEADPOOL (Marvel/20th), which has the #17 opening of all time at $135.1M (probably $155M with the Monday holiday), is now the highest-opening R-rated […]

  OPENINGS:  It was only 20 years into their career, with 2007’s No Country For Old Men ($74.3M in the US) that Joel and Ethan Coen began to be considered box office forces, and even after that, only True Grit (their biggest hit at $171.2M) even matched No Country.  All of which is by way […]