On a night when a pulse-pounding hour of HOMELAND conclusively answered the question “Can this season be as good as the first?” (the answer is Yes), the broadcast networks continued their fall in more ways than one. ABC:  666 PARK AVENUE now has to be considered officially in trouble, with a 1.7 that’s well below […]

NOTE: Local pre-emptions for breaking news coverage of Hurricane Harvey flooding in Houston (#8 television market in the US, with 2.2% of the population) and surrounding markets will distort the numbers below. The official broadcast program ratings will be available Tuesday morning, along with cable ratings for the GAME OF THRONES season finale and the […]

One useful way to look at box office momentum is to compare the Opening (normally the first Friday-Sunday or in some cases the first wide-release weekend and all the additional days before that) to the Next 7 Days, the first full week in wide release (from the first Monday in wide release through the second […]

This weekend is on track to be the fourth weekend in a row to be up over the previous years.  Paranormal Activity 4 opens very large but will play out very quickly as the young, horror audience flocks to the first weekend.  Tyler Perry puts down his Madea outfit and his writer-producer-director suit and simply […]

This weekend is on track to be the fifth weekend in a row to be up over the previous years.  None of the openers look like big hits — it’s just that Argo is hanging around very well in its third week and there are more films at or near $10 million this weekend than […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is the updated 2015 Scorecard, with Universal pulling into a very close second place (just behind Warner Brothers) thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey.  This performance from Focus and Universal is the first bit of good news in a long time for the hapless Comcast corporation, as its proposed acquisition of […]

  An extra hour of THE VOICE pulverized much of the competition. NBC:  THE VOICE, extended for an extra Tuesday hour, dominated the night with 4.6 (up 0.3 from last week’s 1-hour episode) and provided a huge lead-in for the network’s Hurricane Sandy news special at 10PM, which easily won its hour at 2.9. FOX:  The early […]

  OPENINGS:  We won’t really know the order of the weekend’s closely-bunched Top 3 movies until final numbers are released tomorrow, but since the default position of any studio with a new opening is to claim victory, the fact that AMERICAN MADE (Cross Creek/Universal) is currently in 2nd place with $17M can’t be a good […]