Note:  All times PST 5:01PM:  Wasting no time, here’s Ricky Gervais with his first monologue since the very different world of 2016.  5:02PM:  Not exactly testing the limits with jokes about “Wild Hogs” and Joe Pesci whacking people. 5:05PM:  The crowd hasn’t had enough to drink yet to even pretend this monologue is funny. […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #20 of 2015 now looks like $178 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a little better than yesterday’s estimate ($172 million) and now solidly above the norm for this weekend. Opening at 3,473 theaters Friday, Pitch Perfect 2 from Universal is now on track for a $70.3 million opening three-day weekend (well […]

Weekend #23 of 2012 looks like it will total about $174 million for the top 12 films, up 32% from last year’s comparable weekend and up 19% from the four-year average for the weekend.  A pair of decently-reviewed openers aimed at very different audiences should both put some life back in the box office after […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.   YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2015 to date is still +6% above last year and now +3% above the average for this point the past four years ($7.438 billion).  Over the same period, Hollywood films have grossed over $19.9 billion worldwide when we add overseas box office (that’s […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.   YEAR TO DATE BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2015 to date is still +5% above last year and still +2% above the average for this point the past four years ($8.177 billion).  Over the same period, Hollywood films have grossed $22.1 billion worldwide when we add overseas box office (that’s now […]

  THE BIG YEAR:  Watch It At Home – Very Small Pleasures   THE BIG YEAR is an amiable, good-natured comedy that’s so insubstantial it seems to fly out of your memory even as you’re watching it.  If it had been a low-budgeted indie that turned up at a film festival, it might have felt […]

> Whether or not IMMORTALS holds together at the boxoffice after its opening few days, the impressive launch is good news for Relativity, which is trying to prove it can survive as a standalone distributor of Hollywood-level movies.  That doesn’t necessarily mean Immortals will hit profit (its financial picture is complicated by various distributors handling […]

    MIRROR MIRROR:  Not Even For Free – 7 Years Bad Luck     When it was announced that 2012 would bring two big-budget movie versions of the Snow White story, not to mention TV’s Once Upon A Time, in which Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a central character (and that’s not counting Grimm, another […]