> With one startling exception and a couple of smaller ones, the holiday crop of movies declined on Saturday and are expected to recover on New Year’s Day. PARAMOUNT:  MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL went down 18% and is expected to rise 33% today.  It should hit $142M by the end of the 4-day holiday […]

  It was Bombs Away! for the weekend’s new openings, and even though SULLY (Village Roadshow/RatPac/Warners) will easily win the stanza, it’s not performing thrillingly either.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, its second Friday was $6.3M, down 48% from last week’s opening day.  By comparison, the 2d Friday for Bridge of Spies was down […]

Before next weekend’s arrival of a bona fide hit, The Dark Knight Rises, this weekend was highlighted by a bit of a summer movie poser: Ice Age: Continental Drift (an estimated $46.0 million opening weekend, missing our forecast in Wednesday’s ShowbuzzDaily Weekend Predictions), looking less like a summer movie that should be given a weekend […]

>Based on Friday and Saturday box office (and estimated Sunday numbers), The Lion King returned to theaters 17 years later — in 3D no less — and scored a solid #1 for the weekend.  Drive opened okay, while Straw Dogs and I Don’t Know How She Does It were very quiet arrivals.  Conatagion fell to […]

STUDIO SCORECARD. Disney solidified its grip on first place in worldwide box office (thanks to Monsters University), while Paramount jumped ahead of 20th Century Fox courtesy of World War Z. 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 […]

  A few notes:  this week’s newcomers opened along a range of dates, including Tuesday night, Wednesday, Friday night and Saturday, and those scheduling decisions had an affect on the totals below.  Also, the fact that Friday was Christmas Eve lowered the day’s ticket sales, probably by 30% or so.  (Something similar will apply to […]

Weekend #48 of 2015 is looking like a decent $182 million for the top 12 films this weekend, up moderately from the norm for this weekend (see comparisons below). The Good Dinosaur from Disney should open with $53.5 million weekend during the traditional Friday-Sunday weekend and $76.5 million for the first five days Wednesday-Sunday. The film is on track for around […]

Based on grosses from Wednesday and Thanksgiving, Weekend #47 is on pace to exceed the multi-year average for this weekend by 10% — exactly on the pace we forecast earlier in the week.  Breaking Dawn Part 2 is running slightly behind our forecast pace in this second weekend, but still clearly #1 for the weekend. […]