AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (Marvel/Disney) blasted off with $27.6M from Thursday night screenings, handily beating the $18.7M for the first Avengers, although that blockbuster began its showings at midnight, while Ultron started its run at 7PM.  Ultron was also far above the $15.8M earned by Furious 7 in its Thursday night debut.  Sequels are […]

WORLDWIDE STUDIO SCORECARD.  Here is an updated look at the 2019 film slates by studio. BOX OFFICE. Looking at North American box office, 2019 is now -19% below last year’s comparable span (1 point worse than last week) and still -16% below the average for this point the past four years ($2.752 billion).  Over the same […]

  OPENINGS:  MONKEY MAN (Universal) walked an odd path to theaters, originally being targeted for a Netflix release.  While the result earned strong reviews (87% on Rotten Tomatoes), there was no storybook ending at the box office, as Dev Patel’s film was below expectations at $10.1M.  Nor did Monkey Man stir much excitement overseas, with […]

  OPENINGS:  THE MARVELS (Marvel/Disney) fulfilled the ghastliest projections assigned to it, setting a new low for the MCU with a $47M US opening, and it was similarly dismal overseas, with $63.3M from 51 territories.  The internet is already bursting with theories that include “No one liked Captain Marvel in the first place” and the […]

  Now that we’ve looked through all the major and mini-major Hollywood studios (Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Lionsgate/Summit) and examined their summers, today we’ll wrap up our summer studio survey with snapshots of some of the more prominent independent studios.  Summer isn’t their key season–the August/September film festivals will […]

A down week this week (last year boasted the opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2) erased the big gains last week, and now the year to year comparisons are back to where they were a few weeks (high single-digit percentages). The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide […]

  TOMORROWLAND (Disney) appears to be heading for the low end of expectations, earning around $10M on Friday (including less than $1M from Thursday night shows) according to preliminary numbers at Deadline.  Although exit polls are far from infallible, family movies usually score well, and its B grade is a sign that word-of-mouth may be […]

Weekend #29 of 2014 is looking like $147 million for the top 12 films this weekend, -21% below the norm and the fifth weekend in a row down significantly from previous years.  Opening at 3,303 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), The Purge: Anarchy from Universal should […]