February 21st, 2012
It's a mixed week on the home market. The biggest hit coming out on Tuesday is Tower Heist, which struggled compared to expectations and its production budget. The rest of Tuesday's offerings include more wide releases that missed at the box office, some TV on DVD releases from cable networks, as well as a few limited releases of note. Fortunately, there is a film coming out on Friday that is picking up the slack. Puss in Boots also missed expectations at the box office, at least domestically. However, it earned more than $500 million worldwide, not to mention an Oscar nomination. It is also the easy choice for Pick of the Week.
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October 24th, 2011
The industry as a whole has to be breathing a small sigh of relief after the weekend numbers started to come in. Paranormal Activity 3 broke records over the weekend helping the overall box office along the way. It grew 38% compared to last weekend, hitting $121 million. Unfortunately, that was still 6% lower than the same weekend Last year. Year-to-date, 2011 is 4% behind 2010's pace at $8.38 billion to $8.73 million and there's little hope that deficit will go away by the end of the year.
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October 23rd, 2011
After a poor September and slow start to October, Paranormal Activity 3 put some life back in to the movie industry this weekend with a huge $54 million opening weekend, according to Paramount's Sunday estimate. That's comfortably a record for the franchise and will almost certainly top Jackass 3D to become the biggest October's biggest weekend too. With no other horror flick coming out between now and Halloween, it should be set for a comfortable $100 million or so at the box office (on a budget of $5 million).
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October 20th, 2011
The box office was terrible last weekend, so much so that it is hard to imagine things won't turnaround this weekend. There is one film, Paranormal Activity 3, that's almost guaranteed to be a hit, but expectations for the other wide releases range from expensive bomb, The Three Musketeers 3D; international hit that will flop here, Johnny English Reborn and niche market film just hoping to reach the top ten, The Mighty Macs. Last year Paranormal Activity 2 opened with just over $40 million. Paranormal Activity 3 might be able to do the same, but the rest of the new releases and the holdovers are not looking good, so there could be a sizable decline in the year-over-year comparison.
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October 1st, 2011
There is a little bit of good news going into October, as September did help close the year-to-date deficit, even if it was by a small amount. Unfortunately, we really needed a better result to be optimistic about our chances of closing that gap entirely by the end of the year. Even worse, this month represents the last chance 2011 has to catch up to 2010. I know there are two additional months left in the year, but October of 2010 was a soft month with four of the five weekends showing year-over-year declines. If October 2011 is even weaker, the odds of making up the $300 million deficit will be all but gone. It becomes even more troubling that there are no movies opening in October that are guaranteed to be monster hits. So, while October of 2010 was weak compared to October of 2009, it looks like it will be stronger than October of 2011. Hopefully I'm just being pessimistic. There are a couple films that have a shot at $100 million and I will be surprised if none of them at least come close to that milestone, but the slate of films is weaker than I would like.
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