September 9th, 2006
A ton of
new releases to chart this week led by
The Sentinel with $8.34 million. That's a reasonable start compared to its theatrical total, but weak given its production budget.
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August 28th, 2006
A busy week with nearly 50 films making the list. Of those, there are more than half-a-dozen that are easily worth picking up and with several being contenders for DVD Pick of the Week. I was able to narrow it down to two, Arrested Development - Season 3 - Buy from Amazon and The Tick Vs. Season One - Buy from Amazon, with a couple of honorable mentions, Duck Season - Buy from Amazon and Friends with Money - Buy from Amazon.
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May 8th, 2006
The unofficial start of summer was a disappointment, with the number one film missing expectations by nearly $20 million. However, the overall numbers were still very positive with the box office bringing in a total of $110 million.
That's 7.8% higher than last weekend and 26.5% higher than the same weekend last year.
Even better are the year-to-date numbers, which now stand 6% higher than last year.
There is some bad news ahead as next week looks weaker and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and its $100 million weekend will hurt year-to-year comparisons the week after that.
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May 1st, 2006
The last weekend in April is generally not a good time to open a new movie since the first weekend in May is the unofficial start of the Summer Blockbuster season. Movies that open now generally only get one weekend of release before being crushed by the competition. Because of this, studios tend to dump films that have lowered expectations during this weekend. So there's little surprise that the total box office was down 6.6% from last week to $102 million. But more importantly, that represents a 12.6%
increase from the same weekend last year despite the fact that last year's
number one film earned nearly $5 million more than this year's
number one film did. This surge had helped the year-to-date figure grow to $2.603 billion, up 4.7% over last year's pace. This is significant because it puts ticket sales on the rise as well as total box office.
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April 28th, 2006
The first of the new Friday edition Weekly Website Review column is here, but not without a hitch. We had a bit of a power outage early in the day so I did what any modern man would do when faced with the prospects of going without the Internet for an undetermined amount of time, I took a nap. Fortunately, I was mostly done before the power went out so there was no real affect on this week's list, but I am starting to this that this column is cursed. As for the list, its pretty average with the best of the bunch being
A Scanner Darkly -
Official Site.
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April 27th, 2006
It's a busy week for wide releases with four such films coming out, although none of them look like breakout hits.
In fact, only one of the films is opening in significantly more than 2,000 theatres.
Continuing the overriding trend of the year, the film that is earning the worst reviews of the weekend should also top the charts.
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April 21st, 2006
A trio of new films tackle Scary Movie 4 this weekend, looking to become the next box office champ.
None of the films are winning over the critics, and one of them was not even screened, but that isn't necessarily the huge warning sign that it usually signifies.
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April 21st, 2006
A trio of new films tackle
Scary Movie 4 looking to become the next box office champ. None of the films are winning over the critics with one of them not even being screened, but that doesn't seem to be the huge warning sign that it usually signifies.
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April 13th, 2006
Back to normal levels of traffic on this list, but like last week there's not an over abundance of huge sites on this week's list. I hope that changes soon as the summer box office season is just around the corner. The best of the bunch this week is
Hard Candy -
Official Site, which has been slowly growing for months.
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April 6th, 2006
It's a much busier week this week including several sites that I found through e-mails. Thanks for the tips. (On a side note, if you sent me an e-mail regarding a movie site and I forgot it, please send it again. It was a big list this week and I'm almost positive one or two sites slipped between the cracks.) Unfortunately, while there are plenty of sites on this week's list, there's not a lot of top notch ones. The movie on this list that made me the most excited was
The Simpsons Movie, and that one doesn't even have an official movie site, just the
teaser trailer.
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April 1st, 2006
March wasn't as strong as expected and April doesn't seem to have what it takes to turn things around. IMDb has a poll they run every month on what film you are looking forward to the most. This time the number one film is
Silent Hill was in first with 16.5% of the vote. Number two went to 'Other' at 13.0% of the vote. This is a really, really bad sign. With no advanced buzz, many films will have a hard time attracting an audience, which not only means less people are seeing the movies, but also less people are seeing the trailers for the big summer releases, which means less buzz about the summer releases... On the other hand, there are several limited releases that look promising including
Friends with Money,
Hard Candy,
The Notorious Bettie Page, and
Kinky Boots. Unfortunately, all but the first are being released on April 14th.
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March 23rd, 2006
This week's list is shorter than expected, but at least there's a site that clearly deserves to be the winner of the Weekly Website award:
The Inside Man -
Official Site.
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January 19th, 2006
During the past week promotional websites for several movies were launched and some older ones added additional content. It's busier on this week's list than it has in a while, but there was only one site that was in contention to win the award,
Underworld: Evolution -
Official Site.
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