GODZILLA (Warners/Legendary) is proving to be a somewhat frontloaded hit, with preliminary numbers at Deadline and elsewhere showing a Saturday drop of 15-20%, down from $38.5M on Friday to $32-32.5M.  If that holds, it will be a much heavier fall than the ones for Captain America: The Winter Soldier (down 6% to $34.7M) or […]

> Hollywood, like teen girls before a Twilight opening, counts the hours until THE AVENGERS arrives. OPENINGS:  Universal badly miscalculated when it scheduled THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT for a weekend when Think Like A Man and The Lucky One were both available for the romance market.  The movie was moderately budgeted (although it had a substantial […]

  The studios continued to be bullish on their holiday estimates, with preliminary Monday numbers expecting strong business that may or may not be confirmed in final box office figures tomorrow.  For now, the most optimistic film is HEAVEN IS FOR REAL (TriStar/Sony), expecting a mere 7% drop on Monday, with the older skewing NEIGHBORS […]

>With eight nights of ratings in for the May Sweep (official ratings for April 26-May 2 and fast national ratings for May 3), here’s an early look at the final major ratings sweep period of the broadcast season, when ratings are measured locally in each of the 214 television markets across the country.  The numbers […]

The ratings below are household ratings from the 56 television markets with local Nielsen meters for Saturday June 7 and Sunday June 8, 2014. The 56 markets (out of 210 total) cover about 70% of the US television population.   Horse Racing: Triple Crown Belmont Stakes (Saturday) 4.0 rating NBC 4:30-5:00 pm (+190% from 2.1 […]

    The Peacock is clearly trying to get the jump on next week’s Upfronts with some early series orders.  The advantage of early announcements, even apart from the possibility that NBC will launch some of its new shows in August post-Olympics, is that it enables the production studios to make quick offers to writers […]

  The negligible horror cheapie INCARNATE (High Top/Blumhouse/Universal) is the only new wide opening of the post-Thanksgiving weekend, and with just $800K on Friday according to preliminary numbers at Deadline and a weekend that may not break $2M, even the ultra-low budget Blumhouse division may not be able to find any shred of profit from […]

Day 7 of the World Cup (Wednesday) turned in mediocre ratings on ESPN by 2014 standards (2.3 to 3.2 million viewers for the three matches, on the bottom half of the ranking chart).  But the 2:30 and 5:30 matches yesterday would still be above the 2010 ESPN average for Group Stage (early round) matches, while […]