OPENINGS:  UNCHARTED (Columbia/Sony) had a strong start with $44.2M ($51M with the holiday Monday), once again largely due to the M18-34 demo, but also suggesting that Tom Holland may be emerging as an action star even without webs to spin.  (Of course it didn’t hurt that Uncharted followed his mega-smash Spider-Man so closely that […]

  OPENINGS:  CAPTAIN MARVEL (Marvel/Disney) launched with $455M worldwide, the highest superhero intro movie ever (although not all the titles in that category opened in China on their first weekend).  In the US, its $153M total was #2 behind Black Panther, which had the advantage of a holiday weekend Sunday.  Captain Marvel declined 14% on […]

  OPENINGS:  THE MARKSMAN (Open Road) allows Liam Neeson to lay claim to being the most prolific movie star of the pandemic, following on the releases of Honest Thief and the smaller-scale Made In Italy.  Despite a holiday weekend opening, Marksman‘s 3-day $3.2M start is below the $4.1M for Honest Thief, with a 4-day total […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #12 of 2015 looks like $123 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a little better than it looked yesterday but still below the norms for this weekend.   Opening at 3,875 theaters Friday, Insurgent from Lionsgate/Summit is on track for a $54.0 million opening three-day weekend (better than yesterday’s estimate and […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, Weekend #36 of 2013 now looks like $67 million for the top 12 films, a few million dollars better than yesterday’s estimate and now up slightly from the average post-Labor Day weekends the past few years. Opening at 3,107 theaters Friday, Riddick from Universal grossed $7.3 million Friday and a […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #34 of 2015 now looks like $92 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, somewhat above the norm for this weekend (thanks mostly to Straight Outta Compton and definitely not the three openers) but below the same weekend last year (see track below). Opening at 2,766 theaters Friday, Sinister 2 from […]

  OPENINGS:  THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART (Warners Animation) had a solid 83% family matinee bump on Saturday, but its $34.4M weekend studio estimate is still down more than 50% from the opening of the original Lego Movie, and down 35% from The Lego Batman Movie.  (It’s considerably better than the relatively disastrous […]

  OPENINGS:  There’s no way to spin the $10.5M US opening of  Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY (20th/Disney), and its even worse $4.4M start in 37 overseas territories (with $2.8M of that from France and the UK), as anything but flat-out bad.  Unlike other 2021 musicals like In the Heights ($11.5M opening even with a […]