The Hollywood Reporter has the Thursday boxoffice for STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS (Paramount) at $13.5M, which given the strong reviews and general hype would be a tad disappointing.  Comparisons with the 2009 Star Trek are tricky, because that opened on Thursday night/Friday rather than Wednesday night/Thursday (Star Trek had a $30.9M opening for its […]

  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have the record pace continuing for both THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) and FROZEN (Disney). Catching Fire had no trouble with the all-time record for the day after Thanksgiving, doubling its holiday number to $31M on Friday.  This wasn’t just far better than the previous post-Thanksgiving Friday ($22.6M for […]

  Early numbers at Deadline and elsewhere make DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (20th) the runaway winner at the Friday box office with $26-27M.  That could give it a weekend as high as $70M, at the high end of expectations and breezing past Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its $54.6M […]

  FURIOUS 7 (Universal) will handily take its third consecutive weekend title after what preliminary numbers at Deadline say was an $8M Friday.  That’s down about 58% from last Friday (which was 54% down from the Friday before), and puts the blockbuster in line for a $25M weekend, which would give it $290M in the […]

  This was never going to be much of a box office weekend, and the east coast snowstorms certainly won’t help.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, all 3 of the newcomers are closely packed with $3.5-4M Fridays and probable $9.5-11M weekends, so word of mouth could put any of them ahead. The early leader, […]

  Hollywood offered slim competition to the second weekend of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2 (Marvel/Disney) and the latest comic book spectacular will easily win the weekend with what Deadline currently estimates will be $60M.  That’s a 59% drop from last weekend, steeper than the 55% for the first Guardians, even though Vol 2 […]

  A piece of beloved genre IP that gets rave reviews is hard to beat, and the newest iteration of HALLOWEEN (Blumhouse/Miramax/Universal) is headed toward a huge opening.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline put Friday at $33M ($7.7M from Thursday night), and even allowing for the typical front-loading of sequels and horror movies, that should mean […]

> TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON becomes the latest franchise movie to fall short in the US compared to prior chapters of the series, despite an increased 3D ticket price.  (Like others, most notably Pirates 4, it may well make up the shortfall overseas.)  That doesn’t make a US gross of $350M anything to complain […]