Universal, having eaten a poisoned apple with Battleship, is relieved by this weekend’s tastier produce. OPENINGS:  SNOW WHITE & THE HUNTSMAN (Universal) muscled its way to a $56.3M opening, which is what it needed, considering its $175M (plus marketing) cost.  The $39.3M pulled in from 45 territories overseas is initially underwhelming, although there’s plenty […]

> Tonight’s Grammy Awards were inevitably somewhat haunted by the awful loss of Whitney Houston barely 24 hours earlier, a tragedy that seemed to have been going on for a decade yet was still shocking when it came to its fruition.  Nevertheless, the show found time to include innumerable music numbers, some of them saluting […]

> In less than 24 hours, boxoffice figures for tonight’s midnight opening of THE HUNGER GAMES will start to arrive, and after that, the data, analysis and comparisons will be flooding in all weekend.  You can play along:  here’s a cheat sheet with some important numbers to keep in mind as the numbers roll in. […]

> It seems like only yesterday that we were reviewing the records for midnight openings (actually, it was March 23, when The Hunger Games opened with a 7th-highest $19.7M Thursday midnight–the highest ever for a non-sequel).  Now we’re just a few hours away from the US arrival of THE AVENGERS, which… is it a sequel?  […]

  COWBOYS & ALIENS – Watch It At Home:  Genre Mash-Up Zaps Itself In the Foot   It’s admirable, in a way, that for much of its length, COWBOYS AND ALIENS is willing to be more of a western than a scifi extravaganza, even though scifi is a safer commercial bet.  The problem is that […]

  CARNAGE:  Watch It At Home – Polanski and All-Star Cast Miss the Bullseye   The trick about CARNAGE, which is based on the Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, is that despite its pedigree, and the big names usually associated with it, it’s more of a game than a revelation.  The […]

  Click on SHOWBUZZDAILY‘s reviews from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in alphabetical order:   2 DAYS IN NEW YORK (Magnolia) BACHELORETTE (No Distrib) BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Fox Searchlight) CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER (Sony Pictures Classics) COMPLIANCE (Magnolia) FILLY BROWN (No Distrib) THE FIRST TIME (No Distrib) FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL… (Focus) […]

Team Salem’s top pick (Pixar’s Brave) opened this weekend, helping increase the slate to $290 million, up almost $97 million from last week.  Meanwhile, continued strong business from Madagascar 3 and a few others pushed Team Metcalf’s almost-fully-release slate up a similar amount over the last week (up $95 million) to $1.17 billion.   Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter pushed […]