Television as a medium seems to become more exciting and surprising practically every week these days, but one thing remains the same:  The EMMY AWARDS is still the weak, erratic sibling of the other major awards shows, even when the telecast itself is slickly packaged, as was mostly the case with tonight’s rendition from […]

  Below are the ratings in key demos for the Top 25 original cable telecasts last Friday.  Friday cable is mostly for fans of WWE and the Disney Channel, but here are the numbers for a couple of other shows of interest:  THE KNICK (Cinemax) held almost exactly with the previous week at 0.13 and 407K […]

The ratings below are household ratings from the 56 television markets with local Nielsen meters for Saturday August 23 and Sunday August 24, 2014. The 56 markets (out of 210 total) cover about 70% of the US television population. The Little League World Series (U.S. championship game Saturday and Sunday’s Championship game) attracted huge audiences, […]

  Big Brother had no trouble with preseason football. CBS:  BIG BROTHER rose 0.3 from last week to 2.5, easily the top show of the night.  60 MINUTES was also up 0.3 to 1.1, and UNFORGETTABLE grew by 0.1 to 0.9, while RECKLESS stayed at 0.5. NBC:  NFL PRESEASON FOOTBALL was at 1.9 in preliminary […]

  OPENINGS:  IF I STAY (Warners/MGM) was the best of a weak trio, opening with $16.4M and with an 18% drop on Saturday that indicated moderate front-loading.  It should reach a fair $40-50M US total, which could get it to breakeven if not profit. WHEN THE GAME STANDS TALL (Affirm/TriStar/Sony), with a $9M weekend, was […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Again, no changes to the year to date studio ranking of worldwide box office.  20th Century Fox remains #1 and also had the largest gain this week (an okay $87 million weekly gain, mostly because of continued overseas grosses of How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes).  Disney, […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #34 of 2014 now looks like $105 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a little better than yesterday’s estimate ($103 million) but still somewhat below our forecast ($111 million) and still a robust 17% above the norm for this weekend ($86 million). Opening at 2,907 theaters, If I […]

  There were no miracle turnarounds for any of the weekend’s dim new arrivals on Saturday.  Instead, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, the expected occurred and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Marvel/Disney) jumped back to the front of the pack in its 4th weekend with a 55% Friday-to-Saturday increase to $7.5M, down less than 30% […]