> The fifth weekend of 2012 is much better than the same weekend last year, but it’s still somewhat below an “average” weekend for this time of year, looking at the past four years.  Chronicle and The Woman in Black are battling for #1, with each trying to make it to a $20 million opening […]

>Four new films opened this weekend in North America and have joined our worldwide box office tracking chart.  Three of the four are toward the bottom of the chart and are destined to stay there.  The other film, Act of Valor, is currently in the middle of the pack but should rise as moderate overseas […]

  There were no new wide releases on this pre-holiday, pre-Last Jedi weekend, so all the action was in holdovers and limited releases.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, COCO (Pixar/Disney) easily retained its crown with a $6.3M Friday.  That was down 67% from last week’s holiday Friday, better than the drops for Moana (70%) […]

> Sony jump-started the release of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO last night with early runs starting at 7PM at its slightly less than 3000 theatres.  Early reports are that it pulled in $1.6M for those showings.  There aren’t a lot of R-rated Tuesday night “preview” comparisons to draw on (OK, there are none), […]

  Franchises are the lifeblood of Hollywood, so it has to chill studios to see three of those entries falter in a single 2-weekend period, especially since the stakes are higher for this week’s arrivals than last week’s Neighbors 2. Based on the preliminary $27M Friday number at Deadline, X-MEN: APOCALYPSE (TSG/20th) is running almost […]

  OPENINGS:  For ROGUE ONE (Lucasfilm/Disney), massive success was taken for granted, and the question was how big a standalone spin-off entry in the Star Wars canon could be.  The answer is pretty damn big:  its $155M US opening weekend is the 12th highest ever, and #3 for the year (behind $179.1M for Captain America: […]

Updated international box office chart:  

  OPENINGS:  LOVE THE COOPERS (CBS/Lionsgate) was the best of a bad bunch, launching with $8.4M.  That’s 30% less than the $12.5M start of 2005’s The Family Stone, but the studio can take some solace from the fact that Stone (which opened closer to Christmas) earned a 5x multiple from its opening weekend.  If Coopers […]