Despite a trio of new entries as competition, BEAUTY & THE BEAST (Disney) wasn’t expected to have any trouble staying in control of its 2d weekend, and it didn’t.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have Friday at $21.2M, down 67% from opening day last week.  That’s only an OK hold, compared to the drops of […]

Weekend #12 of 2015 is looking like $139 million for the top 12 films this weekend, very much in line with comparable weekends the past few years. Opening at around 3,750 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Insurgent from Lionsgate/Summit should average $15,700 per theater for the three-day […]

  OPENINGS:  For ROGUE ONE (Lucasfilm/Disney), massive success was taken for granted, and the question was how big a standalone spin-off entry in the Star Wars canon could be.  The answer is pretty damn big:  its $155M US opening weekend is the 12th highest ever, and #3 for the year (behind $179.1M for Captain America: […]

  This may be a good time to pause the stories about Disney’s infalliability, and the unstoppable dominance of the Star Wars franchise.  SOLO (Lucasfilm/Disney) is underperforming in a big way, with preliminary numbers at Deadline putting its opening day at $36.5M, extremely frontloaded with $14.1M of that total from Thursday night.  That’s the lowest […]

>Three full weeks into 2012, domestic box office is running well ahead of last year’s anemic pace but about the same as the comparable period’s average for the last several years.        The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between January 16 and January 22 grossed $180 million, […]

  NETWORK UPDATE:  All of the night’s adjustments were football-related.  SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL adjusted up to 6.1, which was still far below last week’s 8.6 rating.  60 MINUTES gained 0.3 in final numbers, lifting it to 2.2.  CBS aired its scheduled new episode of CSI even though the show didn’t start airing until 10;50PM in […]

  PROJECT X:  Not Even For Free – Don’t RSVP   How is it that no one has yet produced a 3D found-footage movie?  You’d think the combination of the most (usually) mind-numbing gimmicks of the past decade would be a commercially sure bet, but so far it’s an untapped market. Meanwhile we have PROJECT […]

  Another Sunday with almost no original programming. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary live+same day 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 […]