21 JUMP STREET:  Watch It At Home – High School Meta-Bromance   The meta-ization of contemporary comedy marches on:  Community, of course, is a virtual meta-kingdom, but Happy Endings makes Friends jokes, this week’s 30 Rock undercut what appeared to be its own sentimental ending with jokes poking at viewers who might like sentimental […]

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN will begin spinning its midnight webs in just a few hours, so let’s take a quick look at its competition in the midnight screening record books. The Sam Raimi 2002-07 Spider-Man trilogy were successful at midnight, but with $8-10M grosses that have long since been passed. All of the current top […]

Weekend #31 of 2012 looks more like a late August weekend: two films opening with very little excitement.  The top 12 films this weekend should total $116 million, down significantly from last year’s comparable weekend, which featured the surprisingly successful (and good) Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Total Recall, however, feels like it […]

The big gainers overseas this week were The Expendables 2 (up $36 million to $102 million), The Dark Knight Rises (up another $29 million to $603 million overseas to date), Brave (up $17 million) and Step Up Revolution (up $11 million).  Not reporting yet are Bourne Legacy and Ice Age: Continental Drift. The Words will not be a player overseas, but the other opener this weekend, The Cold […]

The winning streak is over after four straight up weekends.  Weekend #43 will just about match the multi-year average for this weekend and actually under-perform the same weekend last year.  None of the openers this weekend will make an impact on the box office beyond next week, while Argo continues to quietly pack them in […]

The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between November 26 and December 2 grossed an terrific $146 million, up 26% from the four-year average for the week and up a big 40% from the same week last year.  The past six weeks are now 18% above the four-year average […]

  (Almost) everything shot up at the boxoffice on New Year’s Day, but one zoomed more than the rest:  DJANGO UNCHAINED (Weinstein/Sony) challenged THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) for the daily lead–falling short by only $227K–and rose a mighty 79% from Monday to $9.2M, for a total to date of $77.8M.  That bodes well […]

Django Unchained leads the way this week (up $22 million overseas since last week), followed closely by Les Miserables (up $18 million overseas) and Wreck-It Ralph (also up $18 million from some late-playing territories). The only other North American films up double-digits since last week are Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (up $17 million), Silver Linings Playbook (up $11 million) and Flight (up $10 million). […]