This weekend, Denzel Washington is proving himself yet again one of the last truly reliable movie stars.  Just a week after Liam Neeson flopped with A Walk Among the Tombstones, preliminary numbers at Deadline have THE EQUALIZER (Columbia/Sony) at $12.5-13M on Friday (including $1.5M from Thursday night)–roughly the same amount ($12.7M) Tombstones made in […]

  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 […]

  Essentially, right now you could air a reading of the US budget after The Voice and do some kind of number. NBC:  THE VOICE continued on its merry way, up 0.2 from last Tuesday’s installment to 4.3.  The first half of THE NEW NORMAL‘s season finale got the plum lead-in and rose 0.6 from […]

>Many Sunday shows were down from recent weeks last night, with much of the decline attributable to the shift to Daylight Saving Time over the weekend (particularly in the early part of prime time).  However, the drop in Celebrity Apprentice (much later on the night) is hard to blame on the time change, and it […]

  AFTERNOON UPDATE:  MODERN FAMILY and ARROW both rose 0.1 in final numbers, particularly good news for ARROW, now at 1.2.  Their respective teammates, however, fell by the same amount, as both SUPER FUN NIGHT and THE TOMORROW PEOPLE slipped 0.1. WEDNESDAY CABLE:  Frank Darabont won’t be duplicating his THE WALKING DEAD success with MOB […]

  BROADCAST FINALS ABC:  Most of the broadcast networks were in rerun mode due to the NCAA Championship game, but ABC was all-new, as AMERICAN IDOL fell a tenth to 0.64, and THE GOOD DOCTOR dropped 0.07 to 0.37. CBS:  Reruns at 0.44/0.37/0.28/0.22. NBC:  AMERICAN SONG CONTEST lost another 0.06 to 0.28, and a special […]

  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 […]

> Whit Stillman has one of the most distinctive voices in American film, and his 13-year absence from the screen barely shows in his new comedy DAMSELS IN DISTRESS; it feels as though, had it been made immediately after The Last Days of Disco in 1998, nothing about it would be the slightest bit different. […]