As usual, Thanksgiving Day itself was down for many films.  However, that didn’t keep the holiday’s pair of blockbusters from rewriting the record books. THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Lionsgate) set a new Thanksgiving Day record with $14.9M, tearing past the $13.1M set by Toy Story 2.  With the meat of the holiday weekend […]

  NO GOOD DEED (Screen Gems/Sony) held better than expected on its 2d day of release and better than Obsessed did in 2009, and that guarantees the Idris Elba/Taraji P. Henson thriller the weekend win.  Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, No Good Deed rose by about 15% on Saturday to $10M, compared to the […]

  Despite a trio of new entries as competition, BEAUTY & THE BEAST (Disney) wasn’t expected to have any trouble staying in control of its 2d weekend, and it didn’t.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have Friday at $21.2M, down 67% from opening day last week.  That’s only an OK hold, compared to the drops of […]

  The bulk of the week’s openings arrived on Wednesday, and as usual for this weekend they were led by a Disney family attraction.  This year it was COCO (Pixar/Disney), which was more or less on target at $13.2M, down 15% from last year’s Moana and its $15.5M opening day.  That suggests the 5-day weekend […]

  The lack of strong new competition is certainly helping, as is the Wednesday opening that kept last Friday down a bit, but nevertheless, the Weekend 2 hold for CRAZY RICH ASIANS (SK Global/Warners) is on track to be extraordinary.  Preliminary numbers at Deadline have a 4% Friday-to-Friday drop to $7M, which would give it […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD (Columbia/Sony), the summer’s great adult-oriented, non-franchise, auteur/movie star hope, had a solid start per preliminary numbers at Deadline with a $16.7M opening day (including $5.8M from Thursday night).  That’s the biggest opening of Quentin Tarantino’s career, higher than the $14.4M for Inglourious Basterds and the $15M for Django […]

> As is traditionally the case, movie boxoffice declined sharply on December 24, the lowest ebb of the holiday period.  According to Deadline, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL (Paramount) remains #1, with $5.6M on Saturday, a 40+% fall from Friday.  Similarly, SHERLOCK HOLMES:  A GAME OF SHADOWS (Warners) fell around 45% to $3.8M on Saturday.  […]

  (Almost) everything shot up at the boxoffice on New Year’s Day, but one zoomed more than the rest:  DJANGO UNCHAINED (Weinstein/Sony) challenged THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Warners/MGM) for the daily lead–falling short by only $227K–and rose a mighty 79% from Monday to $9.2M, for a total to date of $77.8M.  That bodes well […]