Box Office

Weekend Box Office: Jack Black’s Bernie a bigger winner than all four wide releases

Aside from the fact that Think Like a Man is now officially the year’s surprise hit, the box office for wide releases this weekend has been totally uninteresting, with openers The Five-Year Engagement, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Safe, and The Raven all performing worse than expected. Thus, if there’s a story to be told, it’s that the small

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Friday Box Office: Five-Year Engagement a non-starter, Think Like a Man remains juggernaut

The box office may have been cooking last weekend, but it appears that the kitchen is now closed. Last week’s big winner Think Like a Man reclaimed the #1 spot, trouncing the competition from four new films, including the Jason Segel/Emily Blunt rom-com The Five-Year Engagement, which I had pegged to gross a strong $26 million

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The Avengers opens big overseas, Battleship still strong

In its first two days of release in 25 countries internationally, The Avengers has amassed a whopping $36 million — a powerful indication that it will positively explode when it opens in the United States next Friday. As reported by Variety‘s Stuart Oldham, the Joss Whedon-directed superhero ensemble was particularly strong in the United Kingdom, pulling

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Weekend Box Office: Think Like a Man #1, The Lucky One #2, The Hunger Games #3

As Friday’s box office indicated it would be, this weekend was all about relationship movies — the comedy Think Like a Man coming in at a big #1 and the drama The Lucky One a solid #2. Interestingly, the former held up over Saturday and its projected Sunday much better than the latter (at least by studio

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Box Office Beat: Weekend of April 19

Danny Baldwin's Box Office BeatHello and welcome to the inaugural Box Office Beat column here at Critic Speak, a weekly post in which I will predict/analyze the monetary prospects for the upcoming weekend’s crop of new films. To those of you who have read variations of this column in the past at BucketReviews.com and on the Hollywood Stock Exchange forums, I’m glad we have been reunited here, where I plan to crunch the numbers for some time to come.

This weekend, three new films open in wide release, two of which have a strong shot of unseating The Hunger Games from the #1 slot, where it has dominated for a stunning four weekends straight. They are the Zac Efron tearjerker The Lucky One and the African-American targeted comedy Think Like a Man. Joining them on the marquee is Disney’s annual nature documentary, Chimpanzee, which is unlikely to be a real competitor.

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Battleship not set to sink like John Carter

Taylor Kitsch stars in Universal's BATTLESHIP, which drops in the U.S. on May 18.

John Carter star Taylor Kitsch was already the public face of one disasterous film release this year, but if we look to our friends across the ocean, it looks like he won’t be at the forefront of another.

Over the past week, Peter Berg’s Battleship rolled out in 26 international markets, collecting a princely $58 million haul. The film, “based” on the Hasbro board game and starring Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, and renowned thespian Rihanna, cost a reported $200 million and was predicted to be a cinematic maritime disaster by some analysts.

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