MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL:  Worth A Ticket – Routine But Spectacular   With MISSION:   IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL, Brad Bird makes the very unusual transition from animation auteur to live-action director.   Of course, since his animated work includes The Incredibles, one of the snazziest and smartest action-adventures of recent years, the leap […]

  Dancing With the Stars lost another step. ABC:  DANCING WITH THE STARS had its worst season premiere ever, down 0.8 from last fall and 0.2 from Spring 2014 to 2.4–and it’s only going to get worse, because the ABC station in Indianapolis carried a simulcast of the ESPN Monday Night Football game.  That will […]

      JOHN CARTER:  Watch It At Home – Never Goes Into Orbit   All signs suggest that JOHN CARTER will be a financial failure of historic proportions, mostly because of its colossal cost (Disney admits to $250M, which almost certainly means close to $300M when reshoots and last-minute CG are included–and that doesn’t […]

  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 […]

Although it’s still a strong weekend at the boxoffice, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, neither of the week’s big openings had a particularly good Saturday.  PROMETHEUS (20th) is clearly getting mixed word of mouth, and it slumped almost 25% from Friday.  It’s now looking at a weekend under $50M (although it won’t be surprising […]

Here are the full week sports ratings for Monday February 24 through Sunday March 1, 2020.  Eligible programs include sporting events on broadcast and cable networks (minimum audience size 300K P2+ live+same day).  Programs are grouped by sport and ranked within each sport by P2+ audience size. For comparison, here is the similar chart for the same […]

  This weekend is looking like a battle of the family films, with no clear victor at this point.  THE BOSS BABY (DreamWorks Animation/20th) is performing quite a bit better than expected, with preliminary numbers at Deadline giving it nearly $15M on Friday (including $1.5M from Thursday night), which should lead it to a $50M […]

  We’re a bit more then 2 weeks into the Fall 2014 TV season, most of the new series have had their debuts, and a few selected hours aside, the results aren’t pretty.  We’re going to take a capsule look at where each of the 4 major networks stand (CW is just beginning the roll-out of its […]