> Boxoffice numbers have been bouncing around all day (Per-theatre averages as of 3PM Pacific time!  Number of left-handed, red-haired patrons sitting through the entire end credits!), and they’re still not final or official, but a preliminary picture is starting to come together of THE HUNGER GAMES’ first day in theatres.  Both Deadline and The […]

> One of the good things about going to midnight premieres of blockbusters (there aren’t all that many) is that the audience is exactly the group (young, first adopters, eagerly moviegoing) Hollywood is targeting.  A theatre almost entirely composed of that crowd provides a ready-made focus group to gauge how upcoming releases are faring with […]

  THE GUARD – Worth A Ticket:  The Art of Performance, Crispy and Well-Done   I don’t know that there’s an actor in movies today more fun to watch than Brendan Gleeson.  Gleeson is probably best known for playing Mad-Eye Moody in several of the Harry Potter movies, but he’s been giving sensational performances since […]

Snow White and the Huntsman opened solidly above expectations this past weekend, but the past week marks another down weekend overall for the Hollywood studios.  Too many other movies have failed to catch fire as The Avengers slowly winds down, and late June and early July will be critical if 2012 is going to get […]

  THE AVENGERS:  Worth A Ticket – A Fun Summer Movie, No More Or Less   It’s easy to forget that THE AVENGERS is, you know, a movie.  It’s perhaps the ultimate example of corporate intellectual property, bioengineered years in advance of its production by Marvel and that company’s recent owner Disney, like the spawn […]

  Will it really be that happy a Father’s Day?  Almost every movie in the market is estimating an unusually low Sunday drop because of the holiday, although the Father’s Day effect normally helps only all-family titles. OPENINGS:  It hardly matters whether ROCK OF AGES (Warners) and THAT’S MY BOY (Sony) hit their round-number $15.1M […]

The Dark Knight Rises cooled to $45.6 million Saturday, down 39% from $75.1 million late-Thursday/Friday.  (In 2008, The Dark Knight dropped 29% on Saturday from Thursday/Friday, $47.7 million from $67.2 million.)  The opening weekend is now looking like an unofficial $161 million.  This would be the #3 opening all-time (behind #1 Marvel’s The Avengers at […]

The 34th weekend of 2012 is looking like $77 million for the Top 12 films Friday-Sunday, down 12% from the average for this reliably disappointing weekend.  Returning films fill the top six slots in the weekend rankings, with only one film above a $10 million weekend (Expendables 2 with $12.7 million).         […]