> This weekend should be another good one versus last year, up around 9%.  The strongest entry looks to be Hugh Jackman and the robot boxers in Real Steel — it’s playing in a lot of theaters and we expect a very solid per screen average, giving it a forecast $26 million opening.  (Aside from The Lion […]

The second annual ShowBuzzDaily Summer Movie Draft still looks like a runaway for Team Metcalf ($518.9 million total through Sunday versus about $25 million each for Teams Salem and Weil), but the early lead is really a function of Metcalf’s slate being heavily weighted toward May and June releases.  The lead will only get bigger […]

>Deadline is reporting that Cowboys & Aliens ended up edging The Smurfs at the weekend finish line, $36.4 million to $35.6 million.  But remember that given the genre of each film, The Smurfs should easily outgross Cowboys & Aliens in the long run.  The #1 status of Cowboys & Aliens will be very short-lived, indeed.  […]

> At 7AM today (East Coast time), the Toronto International Film Festival opened its boxoffice for single ticket sales, package orders having been filled a couple of days ago.  As usual, the result was chaos:  if you were lucky enough to get onto the screen where selections could be made, hitting “Send” froze that page; […]

Snow White and the Huntsman now looks like a $56.255 million weekend, according to the studio estimate this morning (up a touch from yesterday’s early estimate and exceeding our forecast in Wednesday’s ShowBuzzDaily Weekend Predictions by a wide margin).         The box office volume for the top 12 films is looking like $135.5 million for […]

> TOWER HEIST hurts Universal on several levels.  It’s a big-budget movie (with marketing costs included, the total is likely $200M) in a genre that doesn’t necessarily travel well, and it was the studio’s big year-end release.  And just to make things worse, next week its pair of Stiller and Murphy have to face off […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has some early numbers for the weekend’s overseas boxoffice.  (Remember:  comparisons of international boxoffice receipts aren’t necessarily apples-to-apples, as films follow different distribution patterns with respect to number and size of markets.)  As in the US, BREAKING DAWN PART 1 is in the lead, with a projected $40M from 73 territories […]

> SHOWBUZZDAILY is only 2 weeks away from traveling to Park City, Utah for the 2012 Sundance Filim Festival, so the time seems right for a rant about the nightmare that is obtaining tickets for Sundance screenings.  Every festival has its quirks, and all cater especially to wealthy contributors who can afford to pay thousands […]