Ratings in key demos for the Top 25 original cable telecasts Saturday (plus a few other lower-rated but noteworthy programs): COLLEGE FOOTBALL on ESPN dominated SATURDAY CABLE, taking up all of the top 6 slots for the day and a few more lower down, starting with COLLEGE GAMEDAY at 9AM Eastern Time.  After Nickelodeon’s […]

November sweeps didn’t begin very tunefully. FOX:  With music-themed competition on 2 other networks, THE X FACTOR slumped to 2.3, its season low and no better than last week’s out-of-time-period semi-repeat on Tuesday. ABC:  The CMA AWARDS won the night with 3.8, but that was down a whopping full rating point from last year’s 4.8, […]

  Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (Paramount) is likely to win Friday but lose the weekend.  Its $8.5M start positions it not only to come in below the wide releases of all the previous installments of the Paranormal franchise (which opened in October), but also below the recent January […]

>Not a lot of change in the numbers as early Saturday results are factored in.  Deadline reports THE LION KING at #1 with $22M, MONEYBALL 2d with $21M, and DOLPHIN TALE 3rd with $20M, so any or all of those could shift as fuller counts are completed.  ABDUCTION is reported to have edged up to […]

Weekend #30 of 2012 looks like $143 million for the top 12 films, the same as last year’s comparable weekend but down 16% from the four-year average for the weekend.  Two new movies will try to take on The Dark Knight Rises without any chance of success. Opening at about 3,000 theaters, The Watch from 20th […]

> In these heady moments after the NY Giants’ triumphant victory over the New England Patriots (I’d say “Sorry, New England fans,” but I wouldn’t mean it), let’s take a moment to look at the other major event of the evening:  the ads for upcoming movies.  (Mitch Metcalf will offer a separate take on NBC’s […]

> On Saturday night, HBO’s GAME CHANGE scored the network’s highest premiere rating for an original TV-movie in 8 years.  (As it always the case with HBO, the movie will be rebroadcast many times, as well as being available on HBO GO and other platforms.)  While there were certainly A list names associated with the […]

  The weekend looks bright for a couple of the new openings.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, WRECK-IT RALPH (Disney) had a $13.5M opening day, on its way to a $50M weekend.  If those numbers hold, the weekend will top the (non-Pixar) Walt Disney Animation record $48.8M opening for Tangled 2 years ago, which […]