If you get the clumsy baseball references in the title than you get that this weekend was won by 42. The Jackie Robinson biopic earned an estimated $27+ Million, giving the film one of the strongest baseball movie debuts of all time. The film took advantage of perfect timing and well delivered advertising to get out of the gate strong. Despite the impending the parade of competition, the new baseball season should continue to allow the film to stay relevant for a few more weeks than it really should.

Bombing into second place is Scary Movie 5 which managed to pull in $15 Million, and providing tangible proof that no one cares about the spoof franchise any more. If any one is a victor in this instance it would be the Wayne’s Brothers. They conjured up the franchise with the first brilliant film, but eventually parted ways by the third film. The brothers Waynes got back into the horror spoof game earlier this year with A Haunted House, which shines an even larger light on Scary Movie 5‘s failure.

Sticking in third place is the newest hit from Dreamworks, The Croods. Easing a very light 36%, the film brought in another $13 Million giving the film a total haul of nearly $150 million, which is huge for a new animated IP from a studio with a mixed track record. There still remains scant children entertainment competition in the upcoming Box Office calender, so the film should still perform well in the coming weeks.

Continue Reading →

This weekend had the distinct feel of a throwback celebration with a Reboot-make, a re-release and a sequel to an 80′s iconic franchise inhabiting three of the top four positions.

Coming in at number one, with $26 Million, was the incredibly well advertised Evil Dead which played very strongly for an extreme horror film aimed squarely at a specific niche. Due, in part, to that specific audience target, the film’s reviews have been mixed and the word of mouth has been less than stellar on the whole. Still, the film plays very well to its target audience and with a big weekend under its belt will go into the books as a big win for all involved.

The next two spots ended up being an estimated tie between last weekend’s top two films. G.I. Joe: Retaliation and The Croods. Both brought in an estimated $21.1 Million, with the tie break going to last weeks number 1 because the Rock is in that one and the main event at Wrestlemania this weekend.

Continue Reading →

The current trend in sequel box office returns is tied to perception. Gone are the days of diminishing returns as a rule, these are the golden times for franchises. How the general public feels about the franchise is now king, and the thing about feelings are, they can be changed.

Case in point, GI: Joe: Retaliation.

The franchise had a below average first film that left a sour taste in the mouths of cinema-goers. It did have a strong opening weekend and final total gross so a sequel was inevitable, but something had to be done to ensure the public perception didn’t bury the new film before it had a shot.

Warming the hearts of movie executives everywhere, GI: Joe Retaliation proved that franchise perception can be fixed and sequels to poorly received films have a shot to come out as strong as its predecessor without waiting on word of mouth or reviews to set in.

Continue Reading →

There used to be a rule in feature animation. PIXAR was the king of quality and they had a perfect record, Dreamworks had Shrek and a whole train load of Disney and PIXAR knockoffs with star-studded casts. Most of the times those films were turds, and provided a sharp contrast that might have aided in PIXAR’s incredible win streak by providing such horrible comparison.

Well that was the past boys and girls, because the quality gap has been dwindling faster than The Croods just past 100 Million at the international box office. Dreamworks newest animated feature had a solid-to-great opening weekend bringing in over $44 Million. Which puts the film on par with other recent Dreamworks its How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind.

A big weekend was probably expected for The Croods, however, the weekend was not without its shocker. The action flick Olympus Has Fallen surpassed even the most generous of projections to bring in over $30 Million over the weekend. Which is a huge win for an action-centirc film in a year where so many have died horrible box office deaths.

Continue Reading →

Coming as a surprise to no one, Oz: The Great and Powerful has come in first in the weekend box office for a second weekend in a row. The film is performing strong as the first blockbuster of the year, even if it is not reaching Alice in Wonderland or Hunger Games heights.  Still the film should get well over $200 Million domestically and exist as another nice win for Raimi and Disney.

In second place, the Halle Berry thriller The Call had a surprisingly strong debut. The film brought in just over $17 Million and is one of the stronger Halle Berry starring openings in quite a long time. The movie was cheap to make and easy to market so this is a really solid early year win for all of the people involved.

The winning stops at number two as the opening of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is anything but incredible or wonderful. Apparently the film is less funny than my word play and connected with audiences thusly. Comparing the film to other high concept comedies it falls fall below its peers. In fact it barely made 2/3rds of what the Will Ferrell bomb Semi-Pro made a few years ago.

Continue Reading →

Sam Raimi sure knows how to make a successful crowd pleaser, his prequel to the most famous movie ever came out with the first blockbuster opening weekend of 2013. Raking in over $80 Million in its debut frame, Oz: The Great and Powerful is well on the way to becoming the first mega hit of the year.

The film didn’t quite reach Alice in Wonderland numbers, but considering the advantages that film had, and the disadvantages Oz faced, the $80 Million haul is a massive win. Expect to see a sequel get rolling very soon as Disney will try to avoid the pitfalls of franchising Alice and put the pedal to the metal on their shiny new franchise-to-be.

Coming in second place on the weekend was last weeks bomb, Jack the Giant Slayer. Jack continues to defy odds by doing  even worse than John Carter at just about every turn. Dropping over 63% from an already weak opening debut and bringing in barely over $10 Million Jack is going to struggle to make $60 Million at the end of its run. Good thing Bryan Singer  has X-Men: Days of Future Past to fall back on, because normally a flop like this is death to a big budget director.

Continue Reading →

You know you have had a bad opening weekend when last year’s laughing-stock, John Carter, is looking at your totals and snickers.

Jack the Giant Slayer lead the way of a first week in March box office that came in like a limping lamb. The Bryan Singer directed film made a poor $28 Million over the weekend coming in over two million short of last year’s box office atom bomb.

If the top of the weekend releases was bad, the rest of the top ten was worse. Despite competition from two other new releases, the hit comedy Identity Thief still managed to hold onto second place with $9.7 million. That put the R-rated comedy over $100 million total and setting it on pace to be director Seth Gordon’s biggest hit yet, providing one of the few silver linings from this weekend.

Continue Reading →

It was a strong weekend for Wreck-It Ralph as the Disney animated feature brought in half a million during its opening frame. However, before we get to that some house cleaning from last week.

We missed out on an opportunity to celebrate Argo‘s rise to the number one spot last weekend. Ben Affleck’s film had a solid debut, but it was on the low-end of expectations. In the weeks following, Argo has been holding incredibly well for a movie that is playing on so many screens. Culminating in finally taking the top spot last weekend in an otherwise weak weekend.

How did it do this weekend? Well since it wasn’t number one again you will have to wait to find out. The winner this weekend was Wreck-It Ralph, another Disney animated feature that proves there is still some magic left in the mouse house proper. Coming out with nearly $50 Million, Ralph managed one of Disney’s biggest animated openings. Of course even those lofty numbers pale in comparison to the PIXAR average, but from the studios that brought us Home on the Range, this is great business.

Continue Reading →

Oh late October, how you are filled with mystery and intrigue in regards to the Box Office. Last year at this time the third Paranormal Activity ‘film’ set October records with a huge opening. This year another record has been set on this weekend, but not by the sequel to the found footage ghost-a-palooza.

But first we must report on the winner of this weekend, and we use that term loosely. Paranormal Activity 4 could only muster about $30 Million in its opening frame. Now I know what you are saying: ‘Hey, pompous box office reporting guy, $30 Million is a huge first weekend this time of year, especially for a cheap film with a built-in home video audience.’ You would be 100% right, but in this day and age of sequels and remakes, success is often judged on the franchise average and not the actual performance. In that light, PA4 is going to go down as the worst performing of the bunch, and probably by a wide margin too.

Over on the happier end of the spectrum is the growing beast that is Argo. Last weekend the film came in a close second with a solid near $20 Million weekend. This weekend it did something rather incredible, Argo only dropped 14.6% with a total close to $17 Million. This is the best hold ever for a film in such a wide release over a non holiday weekend. Word of mouth has not just buoyed the film, but it has turned a nice performing movie into a record breaker, and one that will likely get much more attention before direct competition arrives in the form of Bond, Jame Bond.  

Continue Reading →

Well kudos to Taken 2, it was speculated in this very spot last week that the poor word of mouth and reviews would put a big dip into the action sequel’s take this weekend. The wrongness is strong with this one.

The Liam Neeson punch-fest held off the critical darling Argo for the top spot yet again in the box office trenches. The film brought in an estimated $22.5 Million over the three-day weekend with a relatively healthy dip of only 54.6%. For an R-rated action film with a built-in audience who presumably all went and saw it the first weekend, that drop is pretty strong.

Argo came up in second, with a still very respectable $20 Million weekend. The Affleck directed ‘incredible true story’ did about as well as a movie of this nature can reasonably expect to do, and with the heaps and heaps of love and positive word of mouth this film is getting it should play well for a few more weeks.

Continue Reading →

The consensus seems to be that Taken 2 is a lesser version of its predecessor, but in this day and age an opening weekend has as much to do with the reception of the last film than anything else. Which ends up being a very good industry trend for the Liam Neeson sequel as the movie racked in one of the biggest October openings ever.

Coming in at a cool $50 million, Taken 2 easily won this weekend’s box office tussle. The reviews and word of mouth have not been kind to the film, so it might have a big drop off next weekend, but at this point in time the movie is a win. If it some how finds some minimal legs amid the poor word of mouth, the movie can still get over $100 million and end up in the hit category.

Hotel Transylvania held very well to come into second place with $26+ million over the weekend. The success of Transylvania should be exciting to any one who claims to be a true fan of animation despite the celebrity-centric casting. The movie was the directorial debut of Genndy Tartakovsky, the mastermind behind Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory and Star Wars: Clone Wars. With this film a hit hopefully we will be seeing much more from this animation great.

Continue Reading →

Typically the Labor Day weekend is not a huge boon for the box office. People seem to like to spend the pseudo last summer weekend outside at the beach or at a BBQ. So it really comes as no surprise that despite a few new films the weekly box office still sputtered to unimpressive numbers.

Leading the pack this weekend is the horror film The Possession, which was a cheaply made horror film that managed to pull in over $17 Million. The first place finish and the budget beating haul make this film an immediate success by just about any standards. It won’t light the world on fire like a Saw or Paranormal Activity, but it is a win all around for just about everyone involved.

Second place went to the Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy moonshiner film, Lawless. Despite the big names attached this film was never marketed very ambitiously and thus its $10 Million weekend is actually a pretty decent win all things considered. The film is rated R and even though it stars big name actors, it was never really being positioned as a big deal as a release.

Continue Reading →

In America you almost never see two films targeting the same audience released wide on the same day, this is sort of an unwritten rule among studios to make sure films don’t directly compete with the same audience. In China, film releases are programmed by a state-owned organization who are not afraid of pitting two western Box Office titans up against each other in a single weekend.

As a result, yesterday both The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises hit Chinese cinemas, both playing to big numbers.  While both films did big day one Chinese business there has to be a winner, and surprisingly Spider-Man pulled in about a million more for the day.

While Spidey won the general box office, The Dark Knight Rises did do huge numbers as a 2D film and in IMAX . In fact both grosses represent a rather great opening day, suggesting that the direct competition might not have  as big of an impact as you would generally think.

The big day pushed The Amazing Spider-Man to over $700 Million worldwide. The movie fell short of the Raimi trilogy’s lofty domestic numbers, but all told the Sony reboot is a tremendous success in a summer where it was overshadowed by two of the biggest comic book films of all time.

Interesting international box office numbers, which is nice to see based on how much of a dud the domestic box office has been in the last few weeks.

It is weekends like this that really tempt me to just copy and paste last week’s report. The top 3 remained the same and no new movie could do better than seventh place in another mundane, ho-hum late summer weekend.

The top of the charts was once again highlighted by the under-performing Expendables 2 which brought in another $13+ Million. In retrospect, even though the film is not doing the same business of its R-Rated predecessor, taking the top spot two weeks in a row might be enough of a win to help get a third go-round green lit.

Once again The Bourne Legacy came in second, even still it is on pace to be the lowest performer of the franchise. Of course if you look at it in the wrong context that sounds bad, but when you realize all the factors working against the film it actually did about as well as any one should have reasonably expected.

Continue Reading →

Last week I said this was not going to be a big weekend, even with three new films nothing really had good Box Office potential. Even though the final tallies proved that this was indeed a lack luster weekend no film actually had a horrible haul.

The ‘big’ winner of the weekend was The Expendables 2, the sequel to the action extravaganza that dared to load as many action superstars as possible into about an hour and a half ‘splosion. The sequel was probably originally expected to do bigger business than it’s predecessor with its bigger cast and PG-13 rating.

Somewhere along the way expectations tempered and the film’s $28.7 Million take is probably close enough to expectations. Even though it is near expectations, it was still on the lower end, so at this point word of mouth has to be the saving grace for this testosterone fueled franchise.

Second place went to The Bourne Legacy which brought in just over $17 Million. Its drop was on par with the previous films in the franchise, but because the first weekend was weaker the film still lags. That said for a pretty big overhaul, the film has performed pretty well, and there is clearly life left in this series.

Scrapping into third place is the stop motion animated film ParaNorman. The supernatural animated picture hit the stop motion animated glass ceiling with a decent $14 Million which is not great, but hardly bad either. It is nice that the film is playing to some business, but it would have been nice to see the film breakout a little more.

Next weekend sees yet another ‘meh’ weekend at the Box Office, in fact we are starting to see the beginning of the end of summer doldrums where tent pole type films with little box office potential or momentum get a release and bang around for the left overs of the summer season pie.