Box Office Year to Date & Studio Scorecard

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STUDIO SCORECARD. Another very good week for Universal with the moderate domestic success of The Purge and the continued strong overseas performance of Fast & Furious 6.  The perennial also-ran studio (Universal) is now about $300 million away from #1 Disney for 2013 to date.  Universal is actually #1 for the year to date domestically but only #3 overseas.

In the next tier down, both 20th Century Fox and Paramount distanced themselves a bit from Warner Brothers, which remains under $1 billion for the year to date and actually a touch lower than last week’s total.  How can a studio lose ground in our year to date tally?  The domestic totals are comprised of our domestic final estimates for each film, and we adjusted the Hangover Part III and Great Gatsby domestic totals downward this week more than the overseas grosses for WB films increased over the same period.

TOTAL NORTH AMERICAN BOX OFFICE.  Looking at wide-release films in North America (those that play on at least 400 screens at some point), 2013 now totals just over $3.9 billion, still down 7% from 2012 and down only 1% from the prior four-year average 2009-2012. Each year-to-date period below is defined as the first Monday after New Year’s Day through the most recent Sunday. The past week generated a soft $206 million in wide-release North American box office, down 3% from the same week last year but down 8% from the 2009-2012 average for the same week. (The most recent week’s numbers are based on weekend estimates, which are usually at worst a couple of percentage points of the final weekend tallies.)

Over the past six weeks, 2013 is now 13% above the same six weeks in 2012 and up 17% from the four-year average in the same time frame.