>Based on Friday and Saturday box office (and estimated Sunday numbers), The Help continues at #1, down an impressive 29% from last weekend.  All the openers are very weak, with per theater numbers well below average.  However, the theater counts come with a big asterisk.  The counts are accurate for Friday, but the Saturday counts […]

>Six full weeks into 2012, domestic box office continues to run well ahead of last year’s anemic pace and now has moved slightly ahead of the comparable period’s average for the last several years.  The Vow officially opened at #1 with $41,202,458 the first three days (missing the studio estimate of $41,700,000 issued Sunday morning).  […]

> The past week (seven days ending Sunday) came in up 16% versus last year’s comparable week (the second significant increase in as many weeks).  Year-to-date box office is now down 6% versus last year.    The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between July 18 and July 24 grossed $289 million, up 16% versus […]

> Not Even For Free. There’s a key scene in the new SOUL SURFER where the one-armed teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who’s had her other arm chewed off by a shark and who despairs of her career in competition, is in Thailand on a Christian mission to tend to tsunami survivors.  And these survivors, having […]

>Three films join the worldwide box office tracking chart this weekend.  With a profile similar to Tintin‘s (very good overseas appeal but limited domestic interest), The Secret World of Arrietty is just outside of the top 10 movies over the last three months.  The anime import from Japan has grossed $126 million overseas, but we […]

>Through Sunday, worldwide box office results show that The Smurfs have moved up to #10 among 2011 releases (out of 88 wide-release films this year to date).  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is now at #12, about $70 million behind The Smurfs.  Although Rise will out-gross Smurfs domestically, the little blue guys are […]

> Worth A Ticket; An often stupendous achievement that courts ridicule–and sometimes earns it. Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE is at once the filmmaker’s most emotionally grounded and dizzyingly ambitious film, his most relatable and esoteric piece of work.  In a sense it’s the definitive Malick film, the one that explores his chosen themes […]

>Well, it’s officially a rout.  Team Salem has built a whopping $225 million lead, even with the under-performance of Green Lantern.  If Team Metcalf is going to get back into this contest, Cars 2 better behave like a high-end Pixar film and Transformers: Dark of the Moon needs to be a mega-hit.  Next update on […]