Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #21 of 2014 looks like $180 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, well below our $205 million forecast and down 28% from the same weekend last year (but still up 6% from the norm for this weekend over the last few years).  Basically, the two openers this weekend are […]

Weekend #18 of 2012 (the first weekend of May and the unofficial start of the summer movie season) looks like it will be about $214 million for the top 12 films, up 38% from last year’s comparable weekend and up 46% from the four-year average for this weekend.  It’s all about Marvel’s The Avengers.   […]

  FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM (Warners) wasn’t expected to touch the $60-90M opening day territory of the latter Harry Potter movies, since Fantastic is a spin-off that doesn’t include any of the major Potter characters.  But preliminary numbers at Deadline have it at $29.4M, lower than any of the Potters, and even […]

Weekend #23 of 2014 is looking like a pretty typical $149 million for the top 12 films this weekend, within 1% of the norm for this weekend and 4% above the same weekend last year.   Opening at over 3,000 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two […]

Now 18 full weeks into 2012 (entering the middle third of the year, the all-important May-August period), year-to-date domestic box office is now running 20% ahead of last year’s pace and now 15% ahead of the comparable period’s average for the last several years.   Marvel’s The Avengers ended up with an even stronger weekend than the studio forecast Sunday morning: an […]

World Cup 2014 continued Friday with a well-rated match on ESPN Friday at 3 pm (Netherlands versus Spain), which averaged 3.1 million viewers of any age and a 2.09 rating with men 18-49, well above the ESPN average for Group Stage matches in 2010 (2.1 million total viewers and 1.47 men 18-49 rating) and slightly […]

    More, more, more news from The Peacock: Try to hold on to your lunch:  WHITNEY is back, lack of quality (and even lack of ratings) apparently not meaning too much at the network these days.  (At least it seems to be confirmed that PARKS & RECREATION has a full 22-episode order, not the […]

Ratings for Thursday’s matches on ESPN and ESPN2 are in and of course the Germany vs USA match was the highest-rated match of the day, but only the third-highest USA match in World Cup 2014 because ESPN rated 187 minutes for the entire coverage (pre-match, post-match, halftime and the game itself) instead of the usual 150-minute […]