Movies

A glum arthouse market may be entering a gateway weekend into happier days after months of distributors — with rare exceptions — pulling out their hair at dismal per-screens averages. That’s because festival buzz is mounting for film after film – from Card Counter, Dune and Spencer (debuted in Venice, opening respectively Sept 10, Oct.

Waitress, the Broadway hit that, along with Hadestown, brought music back to the New York stage last night after many dark months, grossed $197,878 in tickets sales today, breaking the single-performance house record at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The previous record – $184,476 – was set by the 2013 production of Betrayal starring Daniel Craig

For the pandemic, Disney/Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings posted a solid Thursday night preview gross especially before a slow Labor Day box office frame, with $8.8 million  from showtimes that began at 6 p.m. On the high side, that figure is above the Thursday night start of Universal’s F9, which posted $7.1M

EXCLUSIVE: After a successful launch of clips and footage at CinemaCon, Paramount is pushing its big Tom Cruise tentpoles, Top Gun: Maverick to May 27, Memorial Day weekend 2022, and Mission: Impossible 7 to Sept. 30, 2022. Again, these are big potential billion dollar grossing franchises co-produced with Skydance which require the world to be in an

It’s not Venom: Let There Be Carnage going on Nov. 19, rather Sony’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife which received high praise from exhibition out of CinemaCon. Word was that the Marvel sequel would move from Oct. 15 after Paramount flew Top Gun: Maverick from its Nov. 19 date, however, it’s the Jason Reitman-directed, Ivan Reitman produced sequel to the Columbia Pictures comedy franchise.

The Labor Day weekend box office, the last frame of summer, which studios typically shy from, is poised for a revolution as Disney debuts the first Asian American Marvel superhero feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings.  Studios have held the long belief that no one goes to the movies over Labor Day weekend,

Refresh for latest…: One of the only Hollywood titles to recently be granted a China release date, Disney/20th Century Studios’ Free Guy flew into the market with a $23.9M start. This is a solid launch in the Middle Kingdom, particularly in the current climate, and helped push the Ryan Reynolds-starrer past $100M at the international

Being James Bond, from MGM, will stream exclusively on the Apple TV app as a free rental ahead of the theatrical release of No Time To Die, the 25th installment of the storied franchise. The 45-minute retrospective features Daniel Craig reflecting on his 15 years playing Bond, with never-before-seen archival footage from his oeuvre and conversations with 07

Never underestimate the power of the big screen, even as a marketing tool. This past weekend, the film and music industries crossed roads as Imax delivered a unique global stunt for 2x Grammy nominee and multi-platinum selling pop performing artist Halsey timed to her fourth studio album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. 

Pantelion’s animated film Un Rescate De Huevitos (An Egg Rescue) is a rarity in the specialty box office as a Spanish language animated film. And its opening weekend success will certainly come as no surprise in Mexico where the franchise is its highest-grossing film series to date. The Spanish-language animation performed tremendously at its 320

With the $20.4M opening of Universal/MGM/Monkeypaw’s Candyman, director Nia DaCosta becomes the first Black female director to debut a movie in the No. 1 weekend spot at the domestic box office. At the same time, Candyman marks the second-highest grossing 3-day domestic weekend B.O. opening for a Black female director; that record owned by Ava DuVernay and

Anyone who skipped CinemaCon this year out of fear of the pandemic in Las Vegas missed a spitfire of a luncheon chat this afternoon. Not only was Patty Jenkins smashing the theatrical day & date model, and wagging a finger at exhibition over the decline in moviegoing experience, but also Paramount Domestic Distribution Boss Chris

Today at Cinemacon,  Lionsgate announced that they’re opening their Erwin Brothers-directed movie American Underdog a Christmas Day release. The pic was previously set to open on Dec. 10. Lionsgate timed the release of American Underdog to the climax of the NFL season. “This movie perfectly aligns with the emotions of the holiday season: The power of faith. A

Universal/MGM/Monkeypaw’s reimagination of cult classic horror movie Candyman posted $1.9M on Thursday from 2750 theaters off shows that began at 7PM. The pic, in a recent rare feat for horror pics, has an 86% certified fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. Interestingly enough, another critically acclaimed horror release that played the late August period in 2016 off an

EXCLUSIVE: Here’s some data we haven’t seen yet: The 17-day U.S. household viewership for Warner Bros. movies released this year on HBO Max, with James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad registering 4.7M households through its first three weekends of release on the service. All of this comes from Samba TV which measures streaming viewership in 3M U.S.

Together, the lockdown drama from Bleeker Street, opens on 250 screens this weekend in a specialty market treading water and with little visibility on box office amid daily Covid headlines. The trend continues of specialty films going wider faster and narrowing the window from theatrical to VOD in a nod to the chunk of its

Heading into Lionsgate’s CinemaCon presentation this afternoon, the studio’s Motion Picture Group Chairman, Joe Drake, was trying to figure out what he wanted to say to the room of exhibitors. He regaled those at Caesars Palace Colosseum with a story about how he met up with Cineworld and Regal Boss Mooky Greidinger at the confab

Refresh for updates…Out of all the studios giving presentations during CinemaCon this week, Universal showed great respect to exhibition workers, by including them as presenters in their theatrical release reel. Before rolling a clip on each film set for release before March 2022, a talent from the project would reflect on their favorite cinema, and

Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady galloping after dinosaurs in a snowy mountain landscape, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing being chased by them on European rooftops, and the legacy trio of Sam Neil, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern returning. These are some of the images from the BTS reel Uni presented for Jurassic World Dominion. While the studio