> It takes about an hour, but Nicholas McCarthy’s THE PACT, which premiered in the Park City At Midnight section at Sundance, eventually turns out to have a neat twist up its sleeve, one that switches the movie from haunted house horror to an entirely different subgenre of thriller.  And after that, a solid reel […]

  Audiences to Hollywood:  Happy New Year!  And… what have you done for us lately?  2013 turned out to be a terrific year for high-quality movies, with so many good films and performances that some will inevitably be squeezed out of the Oscar race.  But that was so last year.  What does 2014 have in […]

  BROADCAST FINALS:  ABC’s NBA game was at 0.80.  FOX’s COLLEGE BASKETBALL was at 0.38.  CW’s WORLD’S FUNNIEST ANIMALS ticked up to 0.06.  In late night, NBC’s SNL rose 0.14 to 0.85.   Broadcast Official Nationals Program Ratings Chart   CABLE HIGHLIGHTS:  On ESPN, the HEISMAN TROPHY CEREMONY was at 0.41, an NCAA CHAMPIONS special […]

> A surprisingly strong start for 2 low-budget arrivals, although the upside is limited by tomorrow’s Super Bowl. OPENINGS:  CHRONICLE (20th) had a slight $350K edge over THE WOMAN IN BLACK (CBS Films) on Friday, and both are in frontloaded genres, appealing to young men and young women, respectively.  Young men are more likely to […]

  Franchises are the lifeblood of Hollywood, so it has to chill studios to see three of those entries falter in a single 2-weekend period, especially since the stakes are higher for this week’s arrivals than last week’s Neighbors 2. Based on the preliminary $27M Friday number at Deadline, X-MEN: APOCALYPSE (TSG/20th) is running almost […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #2 of 2014 looks like $121 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, down 12% from the average for the same weekend the past few years (but better than we forecast earlier this week). Opening at 2,876 theaters Friday, Lone Survivor from Universal grossed $14.4 million Friday, putting the Peter Berg-directed Afghanistan War […]

  BROADCAST FINALS ABC:  The unfinished MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL game aired from 8:28pm to 10:10pm ET on ABC (2.42 A18-49, 11.046M P2+) then continued without commercials at 1.91/9.087M. CBS:  Reruns at 0.39/0.27/0.25/0.20. NBC:  The season premiere of AMERICA’S GOT TALENT: ALL STARS was at 0.59.  QUANTUM LEAP aired for the first time since November 7 […]

2013 is turning into a photo finish.  The worldwide studio tallies below are for total box office performance of the films released wide sometime in 2013, so we are still counting up the figures for movies released late in the year.  Warner Brothers and Disney are separated by only $9 million.  Warner Brothers is actually […]