Tag: Box Office Grosses (1-10 of 10)

Dec 26 2012 01:25 PM ET

Box office update: 'Les Miserables' wins Christmas day with huge $18.2 million

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Christmas Day at the box office is always a gift to the film industry, but yesterday, one studio got to unwrap an especially happy present. Universal’s ambitious adaptation of the beloved operetta Les Misèrables started off with a gross that was anything but miserable, earning a tremendous $18.2 million from 2,808 theaters on Christmas Day. That’s the second best Christmas opening ever behind only Sherlock Holmes, which earned $24.6 million on Christmas 2009 (which was a Friday). Overall, Les Mis achieved the fourth best Christmas Day gross ever. Only Sherlock Holmes, Avatar ($23.9 million on a Friday), and Meet the Fockers ($19.5 million on a Saturday) have done better on Dec. 25.

In short, the Tom Hooper-directed film, which cost a reported $60 million to produce, is off to a remarkable start, and with an A CinemaScore grade and inspirational appeal, it’s set to dominate the box office in the days to come.

Due to the holiday, Weinstein has not reported official numbers for Django Unchained yet, but the Quentin Tarantino western seems to have easily exceeded expectations — estimates have Django earning about $15 million yesterday. Stay tuned to EW for more box office news.

Dec 23 2011 02:50 PM ET

'MI:4' director on filming in IMAX and how Christopher Nolan is 'throwing down the showmanship' with 'The Dark Knight Rises'

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Image Credit: David James

Brad Bird wanted to be a filmmaker since the moment he learned to draw. “I didn’t realize this until later,” says the 54-year old director of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, “but the very first drawings I did when I was a kid at age 3 were sequential. They weren’t great drawings – they were just stick figures – but they were meant to be viewed in a certain order. So from the very beginning, I was trying to make films.”

The pictures have only gotten got more sophisticated — and larger — since then. Bird made a name for himself in animation with The Iron Giant, then won Oscars with two Pixar blockbusters, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, both of which he wrote and directed. His winning streak has continued with his first live-action effort: Ghost Protocol, the fourth installment in Tom Cruise’s signature spy-fi franchise — and the second to be shepherded by producer J.J. Abrams — has received rave reviews (EW’s Owen Gleiberman even has it on his 10 best of ’11 list) and is poised to be one of the biggest movies of the holiday season. (The film, which opened in theaters nationwide on Wednesday, grossed over $17 million during a 6-day run on 425 IMAX screens.) Bird took a few minutes to speak with EW about the animation-to-live-action-to-IMAX transition. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 12 2011 09:39 PM ET

ANALYSIS: The box office had its worst weekend since 2008, but there is a silver lining

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Image Credit: Andrew Schwartz; Jack English

Ashton Kutcher’s rose-colored 2012 novelty glasses may have helped gloss over New Year’s Eve’s poor draw at the box office, but this past weekend was in fact the worst overall box office haul since Nicolas Cage got all Bangkok Dangerous on us back in Sept. 2008. It is perhaps not that shocking that  audiences aren’t keen on watching a bajillion movie stars spend five minutes of screen-time inexplicably celebrating New Year’s Eve three weeks early, or Jonah Hill spending 81 minutes cussing at and being cussed out by pre-teen kids in The Sitter. But how bad was this weekend’s take, really?  READ FULL STORY »

Oct 4 2011 04:01 PM ET

'Margaret,' the long-stalled drama starring Anna Paquin, pulls in just 624 moviegoers total

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Image Credit: Myles Aronowitz

Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan couldn’t count on moviegoers to show up for his long-delayed drama Margaret, despite having an impressive cast that includes a much younger-looking Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, and Matt Damon.

Lonergan collaborated with the likes of Martin Scorcese on the film — a post-9/11 drama about a 17-year-old New York City high-school student, played by Paquin, who strongly believes she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that killed a woman — shooting the picture way back in 2005. After its complicated journey to the big screen, it seems moviegoers lost any interest they once had in his follow-up to the Oscar-nominated You Can Count On Me. Playing on just two screens — Landmark’s indie house theaters in New York and Los Angeles – Margaret earned just $7,500 at the box office in its opening weekend. READ FULL STORY »

May 27 2011 01:12 PM ET

'The Hangover Part II' makes record $31.6 million Thursday

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The wolf pack has something to howl about today: The Hangover Part II scored a massive $31.66 million yesterday, the best opening-day gross ever for a non-animated comedy, according to Box Office Mojo. It’s also the third best Thursday debut in history behind Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith ($50 million in 2005) and The Matrix Reloaded ($37.5 million in 2003). Meanwhile, Kung Fu Panda 2 bowed to just $5.8 million, though its core family audience will probably buy most of their tickets Saturday through Monday.

Insiders are predicting a massive Memorial Day weekend at the box office, with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Bridesmaids continuing to generates strong numbers alongside the new releases.

Be sure to check in this weekend for more box office updates!

Read more:
Box office preview: ‘The Hangover Part II’ plans to party all Memorial Day weekend
‘Pirates of the Caribbean’: Why didn’t more American moviegoers opt to see Jack Sparrow in 3-D?
Box office report: ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ posts year’s best opening with $90.1 mil

Mar 17 2011 05:00 PM ET

Box office preview: It's Bradley Cooper versus aliens as 'Limitless' takes on 'Battle: Los Angeles' and 'Paul'

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Image Credit: John Baer

Between Seth Rogen’s wise-cracking E.T. in Paul and the trigger-happy invaders of Battle: Los Angeles, this month’s box office alien invasion (which included mega-dud Mars Needs Moms) shows no signs of stopping this weekend. But don’t expect receipts to be equally out of this world. Holdover Battle: L.A. could face a steep drop after last week’s strong debut, and it’ll have stiff competition from the new Bradley Cooper thriller Limitless, which looks set to do medium-hot business. Meanwhile, Paul could be a draw as the first big comedy in a few weeks, and Matthew McConaughey is looking to make a return to form with the legal thriller Lincoln Lawyer. Here’s how things might play out:

1. Battle: Los Angeles: $18 million
Last week’s champ should lose some serious steam (look for a 50-55 percent drop) as first-week fanboys go looking for fresh entertainment. But as the sole blow-em-up actioner released this month, it could still cash in on audiences who go to the theaters looking for escapist thrills.  READ FULL STORY »

Jan 16 2011 03:27 PM ET

Hollywood's box office slump continues: Are movies losing their mojo?

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green-hornet-dilemmaImage Credit: Jaimie Trueblood; Chuck HodesWith this weekend’s solid-but-unspectacular opening for The Green Hornet and the disappointing debut of The Dilemma, Hollywood is marking an unhappy milestone: Box office revenues have now been down from the previous year’s tally for 10 consecutive weeks. After a bruising holiday season littered with high-profile misfires like The Tourist, How Do You Know, and Gulliver’s Travels, the major studios are hopeful that 2011 will bring a reversal of last year’s worrying 5 percent decline in overall movie attendance. 2011 is not off to the most encouraging start. Though final numbers aren’t in yet, this weekend’s total box office haul looks like it will come in 25 percent below last year’s. Yes, last year at this time audiences were still flocking to the 3-D hit Avatar. Still, 10 straight down weeks stings—and not in a good Green Hornet way.

What’s going on here? It’s hard to argue that studio executives have been making foolhardy gambles. Granted, casting Seth Rogen as a superhero whose heyday was in the golden age of radio might have been a questionable call. But who wouldn’t have greenlit a thriller costarring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie? Or a romantic comedy with Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, and Paul Rudd, directed by James L. Brooks? Or a Ron Howard comedy pairing Vince Vaughn and Kevin James? Those are the sort of down-the-middle pitches studio execs crave precisely because they’re supposed to be safe, but in retrospect they proved to be unwise bets.

Yet, while a number of would-be blockbusters have underperformed and overall revenues have been down, this hasn’t been a completely dismal stretch for movie fans. Smaller, ostensibly less commercial films like True Grit, Black Swan, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, and The Fighter have drawn not only critical love and awards-season buzz but far larger crowds than anyone could reasonably have expected. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 23 2010 12:16 PM ET

'TRON: Legacy' and 'Lost' writers discuss rebooting the sci-fi landmark and their new TV projects

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TRON-LEGACYImage Credit: DisneyFor most of Lost’s six seasons, the writing team of Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis played a pivotal role in plotting the adventures of Jack Shephard and castaway company as they struggled to find redemption on a mysterious, light-imbued island that roamed the grid of reality. But for the final three years of producing the now-concluded drama, the scribes were moonlighting in another luminous, down-the-rabbit-hole fantasyland, endeavoring to bring it — or rather, re-introduce it — to the masses. That ambition reached fruition last weekend when Disney’s TRON: Legacy opened in theaters and scored a solid $44 million at the box office. The film –- directed by highly touted commercial helmer Joseph Kosinski and starring Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, and Jeff Bridges in two lookalike roles — figures to be one of the biggest attractions of the holiday weekend. Think of it as the season’s coolest Christmas light display.

For Horowitz, 39 and from New York, and Kitsis, 39 and from Minneapolis, TRON: Legacy marks the beginning of major new phase of their Hollywood lives, one certainly made possible by the success of Lost. They’re also writing the script for Universal Pictures’ Ouija, an adventure/fantasy due in 2012 (and inspired by the Hasbro board game) that the scribes describe as “Indiana Jones with spirits.” READ FULL STORY »

Apr 19 2010 11:59 AM ET

Is 'Kick-Ass' too violent? And in whose eyes is a box-office 'disappointment'... disappointing?

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hit-girl-kickassI think that I first heard the phrase “box office disappointment” early in the 1980s, at the Stone Age dawn of the Entertainment Tonight era. Even back then, I wondered: Who, exactly, is being disappointed? Theoretically, it should be the chief of the studio that put out the movie, or maybe the marketing department, or even the people who actually made the movie (oh, them!) — the director, screenwriter, producers, tech wizards, and actors. Yet the implication, whenever that slightly scolding phrase would come rolling off of Mary Hart’s tongue (“a box office disappointment“), was somehow that we, the audience, were supposed to be disappointed. In the post–Star Wars era, movies had become like high school cliques that you joined, the more popular the better. And if a film’s opening-weekend grosses were “disappointing,” it meant that all the people who’d gone to see it had joined the wrong club.

Movie grosses, however, can be a bit like Internet dates: They often hinge on an expectation factor. Take, for instance, Kick-Ass. In a sense, it’s a Hollywood comic-book superhero movie, like Spider-Man or Batman or Iron Man, but in a very real sense it’s also an anti–comic-book superhero movie. It cost $28 million to make, it premiered at the hipster-clogged SXSW film festival (can you imagine that happening to a true megabucks franchise?), and when the buzz began to build, most prognosticators agreed that Kick-Ass was a highly original movie that, in its superbad ordinary-teen flukiness, had more going for it than not.

But that’s when the demon karma of Hollywood box office expectations set in. Kick-Ass kicked off such a steady, growing chatter of pre-release buzz that the movie, precisely because it was so eagerly anticipated, was suddenly saddled with raised expectations. The enthusiasm built, over the last week or so, to a kind of publicity-engine Ritalin rush. Measured against those expectations, Kick-Ass was left wanting. It was almost destined to be punished — to be seen, when the box office smoke cleared, as a merely mortal movie, instead of the magically endowed superhit that was being chattered about in the industry and the press. READ FULL STORY »

Dec 2 2009 06:43 PM ET

The big year-end movies: Are they taking too long to come to a theater near you?

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I have a question for all you avid year-end moviegoers: Do you feel frustrated and teased? Do you keep reading about movies that you’re dying to see…but can’t see? For weeks? Or maybe even months? Do you wonder why some of these films, even if they have very big stars in them, have to take so long before they come to a theater near you?

I’m starting to wonder myself. My big double-take moment occurred near the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, when I looked up the box-office report and discovered that The Princess and the Frog, the acclaimed and eagerly awaited new Disney cartoon, had opened in just two theaters. I’d assumed, wrongly, that it had already gone wide. Naturally, on those two screens, it generated a per-screen average of about a hundred million zillion dollars. But why the teensy-boutique, specialty-movie release for a Disney cartoon in the grand princess-populist tradition of Cinderella and The Little Mermaid? Is it really so exotic that the movie was hand-drawn? READ FULL STORY »

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