Once again, Team Weil has the only summer movie slate with any significant business this past week, up $108 million to $842 million to date. Team Salem’s slate grew $15 million this past week, to just under $725 million this summer to date. Team Metcalf grew $29 million (thanks to the slate’s final opening, the […]

  The Upfronts are officially here, more troubled than ever thanks to the ever-declining ratings at the broadcast networks.  (This Variety article does a good job of laying out the ways in which business considerations are altering what shows are put on the air.)  NBC is in the best position of the broadcasters, thanks to […]

> The updated worldwide grosses rankings show that Rango (Paramount) has slightly expanded its lead (with more room to grow) and that Battle: Los Angeles (Sony) is poised to challenge The Green Hornet (also Sony) for #2.   Hop (Disney) enters the chart in the top 10, at #8, with some serious upside in the coming weeks.  It will probably […]

  AMC executives may have felt like they’d been doing some meth themselves this morning–in a good way.  Five and a half seasons into its run, BREAKING BAD returned for its final 8 episodes with a vengeance, exploding to a total viewership of 5.9M.  That’s not just the highest rating by far in the show’s […]

Not quite as exciting as a live freeway police pursuit but still very compelling and much more relevant, the coverage of the reaction to the capture of the remaining Boston Marathon Bombing suspect brought viewers to the normally tough to program Friday evening.  Collectively, the broadcast networks earned a 7.1 rating with adults 18-49 in […]

THE WEEK.  For the recently completed week  ending Sunday (December 16-23, 2012), NBC is back in first place with a 2.48 rating in prime time, a very good rating for the third week of December.  Two and a half hours of The Voice (4.2 rating on Monday and 4.9 for the finale on Tuesday) and Sunday Night Football game (a […]

Marvel’s The Avengers (distributed by Disney) has jumped to $441.5 million to date overseas (up from $178.4 million last week, when it opened ahead of Friday’s North American debut).  United Kingdom ($25.7 million so far) and Australia ($20.2 million) lead the international charge so far, although there are also impressive results from Mexico ($17.4 million), South Korea […]

> As millions will be spending their holiday weekend watching marauding robots rip apart Chicago in TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON, it’s a fine time to salute some troubling machines of the past: 10.  HECTOR (Saturn 3 – 1980):  I’m not making this up:  in 1980, the director of Singin’ In the Rain made a […]