Warners is claiming that Sucker Punch cost around $80M, which given the scale of the film suggests either admirable cost-effectiveness or a lowball number–in any case, word of mouth is likely to be terrible (see my review, not to mention that its overall Rotten Tomatoes number is at 20%), so it’s doubtful to get past […]

KILLER ELITE:  Watch It At Home – Neither Killer Nor Elite   The new KILLER ELITE takes little from Sam Peckinpah’s 1975 action movie apart from its title (Peckinpah used “The” in his) and the general notion of mercenaries and ex-spies double-crossing each other.  This isn’t a huge loss, as the 1975 version was part […]

  MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL:  Worth A Ticket – Routine But Spectacular   With MISSION:   IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL, Brad Bird makes the very unusual transition from animation auteur to live-action director.   Of course, since his animated work includes The Incredibles, one of the snazziest and smartest action-adventures of recent years, the leap […]

    FRIENDS WITH KIDS:  Worth A Ticket – Sitcom, In A Good Way   We live in a pop culture where the recent Emmy Award nominees are so clearly superior to the films up for this past year’s Oscar that it’s not even worth arguing about. (Mad Men vs The Artist?  Game of Thrones […]

Madagascar 3 has ballooned to $244 million overseas to date (up from $157 million through last week).  The third Madagascar has now tied the overseas take for the first Madagascar ($244.2 million) and is now gunning for the $423.9 million overseas total for Madagascar 2. Meanwhile Snow White and the Huntsman had a nice weekly gain to $189 million overseas to date (from […]

  Yesterday we looked at some of the ways that the costs of producing a feature film are higher and more complicated than they might seem.  Today, some additional obstacles that lie between any movie and profitability.   These may be the most important and least-understood part of profitability calculations.  Every entity that distributes a […]

The weekend now looks like $52 million for the top 12 films instead of the $50 million estimate yesterday.  But the basic rank order remains the same.  The Possession remains at #1 and is headed for a final domestic gross of over $50 million now, while Lawless has increased to a $40 million total.  The […]

This weekend is on track to be the fifth weekend in a row to be up over the previous years.  None of the openers look like big hits — it’s just that Argo is hanging around very well in its third week and there are more films at or near $10 million this weekend than […]