> See A Word About Busted Pilots If it’s a procedural, this must be CBS.  HAIL MARY was one of the pilots that had initial buzz around town, and it boasted a casting coup with Minnie Driver in the lead (her first network show after doing The Riches for FX), but it’s not hard to […]

  MINIONS (Illumination/Universal) was expected to enfold the weekend box office in its little yellow fingers, and so it is.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline give it a $45M opening day, which appears to be the largest opening in the history of movie animation (the asterisk is because we now consider “Friday” to include Thursday night, […]

  Hannibal doesn’t have much of an appetite.   NBC:  The positive spin on HANNIBAL‘s 1.6 debut is that it’s better than NBC has done in that awful timeslot in roughly a year, and a considerable boost from its lead-in.  Nevertheless, a 1.6, mired in last place for the hour, is hardly anything to celebrate, […]

>Three films are now in or projected to be in the $1 billion worldwide box office club: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  Clearly, movies with long titles (not surprisngly blockbuster sequels) are being rewarded and embraced around the world.  The […]

  This time, the ninjas chopped the bachelors. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary key advertiser demographics (adult 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 ratings), audience skews (women 18-49, men 18-49 and adults 50+ shares) and total viewership (thousands of people over the age of 2). Ratings analysis and comparisons […]

  It was almost like football season last night, with a sports overrun claiming Sunday’s biggest rating by far. CBS:  Per Mitch Metcalf:  “The Masters over-run into CBS prime time last night (including two sudden-death playoff holes) averaged a 4.1 fast national rating with adults 18-49, which we are adjusting up to 4.7 to reflect […]

>Debuting at #21 (just off the chart below), Rise of the Planet of the Apes has a projected total domestic gross of $155 million and an overseas gross to date of $23 million, as it opens slowly around the world.  But that overseas number will pick up and probably go to $200-250 million, putting Rise […]

  This morning, preliminary ratings had NBC’s REVOLUTION tying its series-low 2.2 rating.  But that turned out to be the good news.  When final numbers were released this afternoon, Revolution fell an unusually heavy 0.2 to a new low 2.0.  That put it behind ABC’s CASTLE for the night–and this was a Monday with a […]