Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” flooded megaplexes this weekend in a bevy of formats, from 2-D to 3-D to High Frame Rate 3-D to IMAX 3-D to IMAX High Frame Rate 3-D to… ah, you can figure out the other potential permutations on your own. Anyhow, it claimed the top spot at the […]
Weekend Box Office: “Hobbit” an expected victor Read More »
Another calm weekend at the box office before the Christmas madness sets in. “Skyfall” took back the top slot from “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2,” which slid to third place. The DreamWorks animated film “Rise of the Guardians” rose to second. The only newcomer was the FilmDistrict dump “Playing for Keeps,” which
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It wasn’t entirely unexpected that “Killing Them Softly” with Brad Pitt opened poorly at the box office (I predicted the gross within a half a million dollars in this week’s Box Office Beat column), but any time a major movie star’s film tanks in wide release, it’s news. “Killing Them Softly” raked in a measly
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As I predicted in this week’s edition of Box Office Beat, “Skyfall” ended up earning the biggest opening weekend of any James Bond film to date, surpassing the last installment, “Quantum of Solace,” by about 30 percent. “Skyfall” grossed $87.8 million over the three-day and an even $90.0m when accounting for Thursday IMAX preview shows.
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Going into the weekend, there was a general feeling that the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy would depress grosses, especially with about 300 theaters along the Eastern Seaboard closed on Friday. But it did anything but–in fact, one could make a case that the box office actually improved this weekend because there was little else for Northeasterners to do–as
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In its third weekend of release, Ben Affleck’s period crowd-pleaser “Argo” showed no signs of slowing down at the box office, dropping just 24.9 percent from last weekend for another $12.4m. Even more impressively, “Argo” beat all four new wide releases by a sizable margin. While the impending Hurricane Sandy undoubtedly had a negative effect
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As expected, “Paranormal Activity 4” earned the top spot at the domestic box office this weekend, but it did so without grossing anywhere near as much as the previous couple installments. #4’s $30.2m opening was down 42.5 percent from #3’s $52.6m and down 25.8 percent from #2’s $40.7m. Perhaps people heeded the advice of our
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“Taken 2,” the ‘Liam Neeson is still a badass, in case you were wondering’-billed sequel, once again topped the North American box office chart this weekend, adding $22.5 million to the till for an $86.8m domestic cume. The revenge pic should easily surpass $100m by the end of next weekend. It probably won’t hit the
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“Taken 2,” the wham-bam action sequel starring Liam Neeson as an ex-C.I.A. agent who must once again save his family from kidnappers, opened with an incredibly strong $50 million this weekend, doubling its predecessor’s first weekend gross. Sweetening the deal: the film made an additional $67m in foreign markets, for a worldwide total of $117m,
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As I predicted in this week’s Box Office Beat, Open Road’s cop film “End of Watch” did much better than most prognosticators expected, with receipts of $13m, and took the top slot on the chart for the weekend. It technically tied for first with Relativity’s horror-film-in-marketing-only (as our Timothy Semenza called it), “House at the
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