OPENINGS:  For a year lean on powerhouse franchises and expected to be tough at the box office, Hollywood’s 2020 is off to a heartening start.  Following last week’s strong performance by 1917, this week’s BAD BOYS FOR LIFE (Columbia/Sony) blasted through expectations with a $59.2M 3-day weekend ($68M with the Monday holiday), and with […]

  HOLDOVERS: NOMADLAND (Searchlight/Disney, also on Hulu) earned $500K at 1175 theatres after 2 weeks in limited release for which the studio didn’t provide numbers.  That’s, a weekend per-theatre average a bit over $400.  Even by the standards of split theatrical/streaming Oscar contending releases like Judas and the Black Messiah (which averaged about $1100 at […]

  OPENINGS:  Note that the entire market in the US will be hit by Super Bowl Sunday, which will be down from Saturday by roughly double the percentage of the usual Saturday-Sunday drop.  (However, Hollywood will hope for a Valentine’s Day bump the following day.)  Even with that included in the calculations, though, the weekend’s […]

  OPENINGS:  BLACK ADAM (DC/New Line/Warners) arrived within moderate expectations at $67M.  That’s the highest weekend we’ve seen since Thor: Love & Thunder in July, but as a superhero epic with a $300M+ production/marketing budget, it’s far below Love & Thunder ($144.2M), Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness ($187.4M), and DC’s The Batman ($134M).  […]

  OPENINGS:  INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (Paramount/Lucasfilm/Disney) barely scraped the bottom of weekend expectations with $60M, and that studio estimate assumes an very strong Sunday.  The extremely expensive tentpole–$400M+ in production and worldwide marketing costs–combined an elderly franchise built around an 80-year old star with mediocre reviews following an ill-advised Cannes premiere, […]

  OPENINGS:  ABIGAIL (Universal) launched at the low end of expectations with $10.2M, lower than the $11.8M for Night Swim and virtually the same as the $9.9M for Imaginary.  Those films are respectively at $32.5M and $28M in the US, which is the likely range for Abigail.  However, the new film reportedly cost $28M before […]

  OPENINGS:  January is often welcoming to low-budget horror, but that didn’t help THE DAMNED (Vertical), which found $800K at 732 theaters, a meager $1100 weekend per-theater average. HOLDOVERS:  Flooding the holiday zone with family entertainments worked out very well for the studios, which had a quartet of bona fide smash hits between Thanksgiving and […]

>Based on Friday and Saturday box office (and estimated Sunday numbers), the total box office for this weekend is now looking like $151 million, up 2% from last year.  Saturday business (impacted by New Year’s Eve) was not as rough as expected and the studio projections are now fairly rosy, as they are expecting a […]