Based on Friday’s grosses, Weekend #27 of 2013 looks like a terrific $223 million for the top 12 films, up sharply from the comparable weekend in recent years. Not even The Lone Ranger could derail a hot summer box office, which is up 30% or more in three of the last four weekends. Opening at […]

  OPENINGS:  GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE (Columbia/Sony) opened with $44M, which was $2M below the launch of the 2016 Ghostbusters, a result treated as such a disaster that the franchise had to be re-rebooted.  Afterlife, though, is considered a success, thanks to a lower production budget ($75M, moderate for a tentpole), pandemic box office standards, and the […]

> FOX will be staring at the weather radar in Detroit all day today.  Game 5 of the American League Championship Series (Texas going for a 4 games to 1 end of the series on the road) is set to start at 4:19 pm.  FOX simply cannot afford another delayed start, which could blow out […]

  The gamble of CRAZY RICH ASIANS (Color Force/SK Global/Warners) is paying off with solid returns.  The film opened on Wednesday and earned $8.8M in its first two days, and preliminary numbers at Deadline have its Friday at $7M.  That should give it a $21M 3-day weekend and around $30M since opening day.  A $70M […]

  HBO’s Aaron Sorkin opus THE NEWSROOM fared well in its Season 2 premiere last night, drawing 2.2M total viewers (plus another 400K for the late-night re-airing).  Demo info won’t be available until tomorrow, but that should translate into a solid 0.9-1.0 in 18-49s.  The total viewer number isn’t quite a series record–the Season 1 […]

  OPENINGS:  There’s no way to spin the $10.5M US opening of  Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY (20th/Disney), and its even worse $4.4M start in 37 overseas territories (with $2.8M of that from France and the UK), as anything but flat-out bad.  Unlike other 2021 musicals like In the Heights ($11.5M opening even with a […]

>On ABC, Man Up!, Revenge and Once Upon a Time are now the top three on-air promotion priorities over the past week.  Of course, Man Up! and Once Upon premiere this week, and ABC is clearly standing behind Revenge, which had a promising uptick last week.  In order to show the most relevant and stable […]

  Only college football livened up Labor Day Weekend’s Sunday. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary 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 […]