Weekend #33 of 2012 looks like an unusually robust third weekend of August.  Four new films open, with The Expendables 2 an atypically strong entry for this late weekend.  The top 12 films this weekend should total $143 million, up over 35% from the pace for the same weekend the last few years. Opening at […]

  OPENINGS:  THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (Reliance/Universal) was built for weekend matinees, and a 47% Saturday bump carried it to a $26.9M weekend.  Among recent fall supernatural family movies, that puts it $3.2M above Goosebumps, and $2.2M below Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, suggesting a US landing place around $85M.  […]

  Truth be told, “weekend” box office doesn’t mean much in a week where Friday/Saturday/Sunday are no stronger than the weekdays that surround them, and virtually all the openings took place on Wednesday.  (Also, morning estimates aren’t very different from the preliminary numbers we posted last night.)  Nevertheless, a few thoughts. OPENINGS:  THE WOLF OF […]

This weekend is on track to be the fourth weekend in a row to be up over the previous years.  Paranormal Activity 4 opens very large but will play out very quickly as the young, horror audience flocks to the first weekend.  Tyler Perry puts down his Madea outfit and his writer-producer-director suit and simply […]

>The seventh weekend of the year should generate about $142 million for the top 12 films — up 9% from last year’s comparable weekend and up over 20% from the four-year average for this weekend.  Nicolas Cage should lead a crowded field, although the second Ghost Rider should be down significantly from 2007’s original.  The […]

Weekend #45 of 2014 is looking like $167 million for the top 12 films this weekend, up 19% from the norm for this weekend.   Opening at 3,500 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two years), Interstellar from Paramount should average a terrific $18,500 per theater for the […]

  OPENINGS:  The east coast blizzard seems to have had less effect on the weekend box office than one might have assumed, considering that all the newcomers went up from Friday to Saturday, even though they were in typically front-loaded genres.  Their studio estimates have them bunched within a narrow $825K range for the weekend, […]

  OPENINGS:  There were no new wide releases for New Year’s weekend, but a pair of lackluster films arrived for Christmas Day.  VICE (Annapurna) has $17.7M to date, $7.8M of it from this weekend, but it’s been quite frontloaded, dropping 40% on December 26 and staying at that general level ever since.  It should reach […]