LAST NIGHT.  Christmas came again to NBC in the form of last night’s Sunday Night Football game, the final regular season game of the year but which actually was an extra playoff game.  Washington defeated Dallas in a game that awarded the NFC East title and more importantly the final playoff spot.  The game received a 9.2 […]

The following is based on early estimates for Sunday, December 30.  The 2012 figures will be updated as needed when the actuals are released, but any change will be minimal. The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between December 24 and December 30 grossed a very encouraging $399 million, […]

Skyfall is still growing overseas, albeit at a slower rate.  But another $16 million this week puts the overseas total over$700 million and the worldwide total comfortably over $1 billion, joining Marvel’s The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises in the 2012 Billion Dollar Club. The Hobbit: An Expected Journey vaulted $180 million overseas last week.  We […]

  OPENINGS:  DJANGO UNCHAINED (Weinstein/Sony) and LES MISERABLES (Universal) are both success stories, but Django has pulled away from Les Miz over the past couple of days, and should outpace the musical by the end of the week.  Django appears likely to beat Inglourious Basterds and its $120.5M to become Quentin Tarantino’s biggest hit ever, […]

Saturday’s $57.4 million for the top 10 films and Sunday’s estimated $49.6 million both slightly exceed the similar days in 2007 (when December 30 was also a Sunday). Partly because of the way the calendar is configured, 2012 is catching up to the multi-year average for December 16-30 (2012 is now only 1.8% behind the […]

Based on Saturday’s grosses, Weekend #52 is now on pace for $168 million, very similar to the outlook yesterday.  However, Django Unchained and Les Miserables continue to move in opposite directions.   Yesterday, it looked like both films would be around $29 million for the weekend (with Les Mis only $400,000 behind Django).  But based […]

  It won’t be #1 for the full weekend, but the story on Saturday was DJANGO UNCHAINED (Weinstein/Sony), which–according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, at least–had its second straight day of splendid growth (+17%) and is challenging THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) for the day’s lead with $11.2M.  It appears as though Django will […]

  OPENINGS:  LES MISERABLES (Universal) fell behind DJANGO UNCHAINED (Weinstein/Sony) for the first time on Friday, because Les Miz was up only 3% from Thursday, while Django rose more impressively by 17%.  Both should be around $85M by New Year’s Day.  Conventional wisdom has it that Les Miz will benefit more from Oscar season than Django, […]