>BREAKING DAWN PART 1: Although the huge day-after-Thanksgiving take lifted everything in the multiplex, Breaking Dawn 1 continues to run behind New Moon by 10 percent. THE MUPPETS: Still well under Tangled’s Thanksgiving gross last year, but given its moderate cost, a solid hit. HUGO:. It’s per-theatre gross is almost identical to Muppets, although it’s […]

  OPENINGS:  THE POSSESSION (Lionsgate) will be a convincing winner over the holiday weekend, based on a Friday that more than doubled the gross of the #2 movie.  Its $6.1M was also 2/3 better than last year’s Labor Day Friday #1, The Help (which was in its 4th week of release at that point).  Possession could […]

    OPENINGS:  THE GREAT GATSBY (Warners) opened about as well as Warners could have hoped with a $19.8M Friday (including Thursday night).  Mothers Day is traditionally a big ticketselling day, especially for female-skewing films, and that should cushion the weekend to perhaps $55M despite bad reviews and unimpressive exit poll results, although there’s still […]

  OPENINGS:  THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Paramount/Red Granite) fell behind American Hustle on Friday, dropping 6% to $6.3M, but considering that it’s a polarizing, 3-hour, hard-R saga that people aren’t even sure whether to call a black comedy or a drama, that’s still a fine result, and the film is likely to earn $50M+ […]

  OPENINGS:  AS ABOVE/SO BELOW (Universal) cost just $5M to produce, but its big-studio marketing campaign will add at least $30M to that, and after a $3.2M Friday, it’s headed for $9.5M by Sunday and $11.5M for the 4-day holiday, which will likely give it $20M at best for its entire US theatrical run.  Those […]

  With summer blockbuster season just days away, none of the studios brought their A game this weekend.  KEANU (New Line/Warners) isn’t going to do for Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele what Trainwreck did for Comedy Central colleague Amy Schumer:  Trainwreck earned $10.7M on its opening day, and based on preliminary numbers at Deadline, Keanu […]

  Half a dozen films entered wide release over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, and none of them is likely to chart higher than 5th place, most ranging from major disappointments to outright disasters. The most unpleasant surprise may be PATRIOTS DAY (CBS/Lionsgate), a piece of populist history with Mark Wahlberg in the lead […]

  All this summer’s box office needed for burial was a shovel, and Hollywood provided that with a Labor Day line-up devoid of any genuinely wide new releases.  The result is going to be ugly, except for a few hardy holdovers. The widest release of the weekend isn’t new at all:  it’s the one-week 901-theatre […]