Happy New Year!  Ratings were down from last year, possibly in part because the night fell on a Saturday, but Mariah Carey’s lip-sync disaster will be viral forever. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary key advertiser demographics (adult 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 ratings), audience skews (women 18-49, […]

  OPENINGS:  DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (20th), with $27.7M on Friday and a likely $70M weekend, will probably have a significant US box office bump over its predecessor Rise ($176.8M, after a $54.8M opening), but it won’t necessarily be more profitable, since Dawn cost a reported $75M more to produce and probably […]

    Tell the understudies to start learning their lines, as NBC wants it to be known that the Season 2 version of SMASH, under new showrunner Josh Safran, will be markedly different from the generally assailed Season 1.  No less than 4 major characters are being written out, and all the exits target the […]

  NETWORK UPDATE:  Both DATELINE and CROSSBONES lost 0.1 in final numbers.  The ABC shows swapped 0.1s, with WHAT WOULD YOU DO down and 20/20 up.  On CW, the COLIN & BRAD rerun special lost 0.1. FRIDAY CABLE:  WWE (Syfy) slipped 0.1 from last week to 0.7, but was still the highest rated cable original […]

  The second 2-hour chunk of the newly anointed most popular scripted show in the history of basic cable, History’s HATFIELDS & MCCOYS, was much like the first episode:  a strong opening hour followed by a second that didn’t quite live up to it.  Oddly, Hour 4 even failed for many of the same reasons […]

Marvel’s The Avengers (distributed by Disney) has jumped again to $629 million to date overseas (up from $441.5 million last week).  United Kingdom continue to lead the way overseas ($48.2 million so far now — up from $25.7 million this time last week).  Mexico moved up to the second-biggest territory ($40.7 million to date — up from […]

Based on Friday’s and  Saturday’s grosses, weekend #33 of 2014 now looks like a modest $129 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, a little better than yesterday’s forecast ($124 million) and 11% above the norm for this weekend ($116 million) but still below our forecast ($140 million). Playing at 3,094 theaters, Let’s Be Cops from Fox […]

 Not At Any Price:  “Art” More Than Art   The name Monte Hellman doesn’t mean much to the vast majority of moviegoers, but Hellman is among the cultiest of American cult directors.  He came up the Roger Corman path in the 1960s with Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper (his films from that era include The […]