BLACK FRIDAY WAS GREEN AT BOX OFFICE

With shopping malls packed on Black Friday, just about every film in the top ten more than doubled the amount it brought in on Thursday, when those malls were virtually barren. Demonstrating once again how dependent the film industry is on the vitality of the general retail trade — movie multiplexes are the anchor tenants […]

CATCHING FIRE SETS THANKSGIVING RECORD

With shopping malls virtually deserted on Thanksgiving Day as stores closed in advance of Black Friday, movie theaters, which serve as anchor tenants at most of them, saw a significant decline in ticket sales from Wednesday. Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire saw its sales fall by 28 percent to an estimated $14.9 million after […]

NFL REMAINS RATINGS CHAMP

With 26.5 million viewers tuning in, NBC’S Sunday Night Football easily topped last week’s ratings. CBS’s NCIS was a distant second with 19.7 million but lengths ahead of most dramatic shows for the week. Likewise the CBS comedy, The Big Bang Theory, dominated its genre with 18.9 million viewers. In the third week of Standard […]

TOP TEN TV SHOWS WEEK OF NOV. 18-24

The top ten shows of the week according to Nielsen Research:1. Sunday Night Football, NBC, 15.6/25; 2. NCIS, CBS, 12.3/19; 3. The Big Bang Theory, CBS, 11.4/18; 3. Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kickoff, NBC, 11.4/17; 5. NCIS: Los Angeles, CBS, 9.4/14; 5. The OT, Fox, 9.4/15; 7. Dancing with the Stars (Monday), ABC, 9.1/13; 8. Football […]

RUDOLPH, NEARING 50, STILL A WINNER

Hard to believe, but the umpteenth rerun of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was the most-watched show in the 8:00 p.m. hour on Tuesday. The stop-motion-animated feature, which first aired in 1964, averaged 11.3 million viewers on CBS, easily won its time period, beating ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (9.69 million viewers), NBC’s The Biggest Loser (6.61 […]

CATCHING FIRE BOLTS DOWN $26M ON WEDNESDAY

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire kept the box office ablaze on Wednesday with an estimated $20.7 million in ticket sales. The result pushed the film’s six-day total past the $200 million mark to about $204 million and caused pundits to reassess their earlier forecasts, with some now predicting that the holiday weekend could produce $100 […]

PLANES TAKES OFF TO NO. 1 ON HOME VIDEO

Disney’s Planes, which was originally intended to go directly to home video but which took a detour to theaters in August, where it took in $219 million worldwide, finally made it into retail stores last week and wound up No. 1 on the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales charts (DVD and Blu-ray Disc). Although actual […]

FORBES LISTS BIGGEST FLOPS OF 2013

The Fifth Estate, the movie based on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks exploit, heads Forbes magazine’s list of the biggest movie flops of the year. The film, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruel, earned just $6 million at the box office but cost $28 million to produce. Doing almost as badly was Bullet to the Head, […]

FORBES‘S LIST OF TOP TEN FLOPS

Here’s Forbes‘s list of the top-ten losers of the year. The first figure represents the film’s budget; the second, in parentheses, what it actually earned: 1. The Fifth Estate $28 million, ($6 million); 2. Bullet to the Head $25 million, ($9 million); 3. Paranoia $35 million, ($13.5 million); 4. Parker $35 million, ($17 million); 5. […]

L.A. TIMES COVERS FRONT PAGE WITH DISNEY AD

The beleaguered Los Angeles Times came under fire on Wednesday for devoting nearly half of its front page to an ad for Disney’s Frozen — a “garishly unattractive” one at that, said the website LAObserved.com. Said the website’s editor, Kevin Roderick: “This is the first time I remember the Times (or any other top U.S. […]

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