A good night for Tom Selleck fans, and not much more. CBS:  BLUE BLOODS was the highest rated show of the night, up 0.3 to 1.7.  However, it’s not clear at this point how much local preemptions for basketball championships affected Friday’s numbers.  Earlier in the evening, reruns of UNDERCOVER BOSS and HAWAII 5-0 were […]

>Through Thursday (and including the midnight showings of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2), Team Metcalf is clinging to a $109 million lead over Team Salem.  Of course, that lead will turn into a tie sometime Saturday night, and Salem will regain the lead Sunday.  Go Captain America and Cowboys and Aliens in […]

2013 remains solidly on the same pace as the other second-tier years recently.   Through 11 weeks, 2013 totals $1.692 billion for wide-release films in North America (those playing at more than 400 screens).  2008 was $1.664 billion at this point, while 2011 was $1.634 billion. The top-shelf years were already at or near $2 […]

> The Hollywood Reporter has some rough early numbers for Friday’s boxoffice, and the news looks good for CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Including Thursday midnight grosses of $4M, it seems to be around $25M for the day.  This would be right in the neighborhood of its Marvel-mate Thor, which had a $25.5M opening day […]

  MINIONS (Illumination/Universal) was expected to enfold the weekend box office in its little yellow fingers, and so it is.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline give it a $45M opening day, which appears to be the largest opening in the history of movie animation (the asterisk is because we now consider “Friday” to include Thursday night, […]

Here is how the week is shaping up for the top cable telecasts (in bold) and top broadcast programs (in regular type) for this week through Thursday, ranked by adult 18-49 rating.  The complete ranking for last week is provided on the left for comparison.

> There’s been quite a bit written in the last few years about the phenomenon of US films doing much better business overseas than domestically, sometimes more than making up for American disappointment or failure–and rightly so, as a glance at Mitch Metcalf’s chart today confirms.  Indications are that the latest Harry Potter and Transformers […]

  This time, the ninjas chopped the bachelors. 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 and comparisons […]