> The Hollywood Reporter has preliminary boxoffice numbers for Friday, and early indications are good for IMMORTALS, which appears to have already earned $13.5-14M (including $1.4M from Thursday midnight screenings).  That should get it to an overperforming $33-35M for the weekend.  A couple of cautions about these extrapolations, though:  Friday was Veterans Day, which means […]

> The new 3D action-fest IMMORTALS got off to a reasonably good start with $1.4M in Thursday midnight screenings.  This isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s slightly higher than the $1.3M RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES made in its midnight runs, and far better than the $550K pulled in last week by A VERY […]

  IMMORTALS:  Watch It At Home – Brainless, Violent and Weirdly Spectacular   There’s no question that the director Tarsem Singh has an eye.  Singh started as a director of commercials and music videos–his most famous is probably REM’s “Losing My Religion”–and his features The Cell and The Fall both had striking, memorable visuals.  Both […]

    JACK AND JILL:  Not At Any Price – 2 Adam Sandlers is 2 Too Many   Does anyone really expect an Adam Sandler movie to be good anymore?  Seriously, if you put aside his occasional relatively serious efforts (Funny People, Reign Over Me, Spanglish, Punch-Drunk Love, all boxoffice failures), and the occasional passable […]

>Adam Sandler opens Jack and Jill this weekend, and it will be an uphill battle for it to displace Puss in Boots from the top of the box office.  Immortals will be challenging Jack and Jill for the second spot on the chart.  Box office volume for the weekend will probably be up around 6% […]

> And the hits keep on coming for the Academy:  following Brett Ratner’s hurried exit yesterday, Eddie Murphy has packed his host bag and left the building as well.  This isn’t a huge surprise, as Murphy was brought in by his Tower Heist director in the first place (and Heist isn’t proving to be the […]

> Nobody remembers the comic strip “L’il Abner” anymore, but there used to be a character in it named Joe Btfspik, who was so unlucky that he walked around with a perpetual dark cloud hanging over his head.  this week, Brett Ratner may feel like he knows how Btfspik felt–but at least poor Joe didn’t […]

>Year to date box office is now back down to -4.0% versus the comparable period last year, similar to where the comparison was back around Labor Day.  As late as mid-April the box office total was -20% behind 2010, but by early June the comparison had dropped to -9% behind the 2010 pace.  In mid-August […]