>Updated Oscar odds confirm a complete snooze is in store for Sunday’s Academy Awards as The Artist and director Michel Hazanavicius are heavy favorites to win Best Picture and Best Director, bringing a very French flavor — and depressed ratings — to ABC’s telecast.  Oscar ratings rise and fall based on the suspense of the […]

> Deadline is reporting that Saturday’s boxoffice for THE HUNGER GAMES is heading for $50M.  This is obviously a very preliminary figure–some late night west coast shows haven’t even started yet, much less been reported back to the studio.  But if the number holds, it would mean that Hunger Games is an even more phenomenal […]

> Well-played, Marvel/Disney. THE AVENGERS:  Years of planning and marketing led to the 2d biggest opening day of all time, $80.5M, that was behind only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and its $91.1M.  (And Deathly Hallows 2 was far more front-loaded with Thursday midnight money, $43.5M compared to Avengers’ $18.7M.)  Now, the […]

      BELLFLOWER – Worth A Ticket:  A Uniquely Mashed-Up Vision     Watching BELLFLOWER, you keep thinking that it’s going to resolve itself into some categorizable genre.  Mumblecore romance, maybe, or low-budget apocalyptic action, or slacker comedy.  But while the film sips at all of those conventions, it has a striking, oddball originality […]

    MY WEEK WITH MARILYN:  Worth A Ticket – Michelle Williams is Spectacular, Movie Is Fine   Harvey Weinstein has two movies on the way in the next couple of months featuring actresses who are presumptively in line for Oscar consideration: The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, and MY WEEK WITH […]

    THE WOMAN IN BLACK:  Watch It At Home – Fun, But Creaky As Its Doors   THE WOMAN IN BLACK is so aggressively old-fashioned it sometimes feels like the horror movie version of The Artist.  A haunted house story in the grand style, it may be in color and wide-screen, but its heart […]

And now the waiting game begins for Team Metcalf.  With all but one movie now open, the Metcalf slate now totals almost $1.1 billion to date, with a little but of upside remaining in Madagascar 3 and to some extent Prometheus. Team Salem’s top two films open very soon:  Brave from Pixar this Friday and Amazing Spider-Man […]

The biggest gain of the week in the ShowbuzzDaily Summer Movie belongs to Team Weil, up $229 million to $554 million to date.  Still in third place, Team Weil will continue to benefit from The Dark Knight Rises and start to challenge Team Salem soon. Team Salem was up a modest $42 million to $686 million to […]