NO ESTIMATES FOR ANY FILM THIS WEEKEND

All major and independent studios have joined Warner Bros. in withholding weekend estimates in what they said was an effort to focus attention on the Aurora, CO shootings that occurred during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises early Friday. Veteran box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com said it was “the right way to […]

PEOPLE STILL PREFER TO RENT MOVIES ON DISCS

Netflix chief Reed Hastings may be doing all in his power to encourage consumers to forsake disc rentals and switch to streaming video, but a new study by Rentrak indicates that — by a wide margin — consumers still prefer renting standard DVDs and Blu-ray Discs than streaming them online or renting them via video-on-demand […]

FEWER VIDEO STORES, MORE RENTALS

Shutting down hundreds of video rental stores has not hurt the rental business and may in fact be helping it. Or so one might conclude from a report by Portland, OR-based Rentrak. According to the company, revenue from Blu-ray and DVD rentals increased 5.8 percent in the second quarter to $1.48 billion. In a statement, […]

KUNG FU PANDA RULES OVERSEAS

Kung Fu Panda 2 has overtaken Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at the overseas box office. Now in 45 countries, Panda raked in $56.5 million in 45 countries last weekend to bring its worldwide total to $330 million, Paramount told the Associated Press. (The media measurement firm Rentrak said that the movie earned […]

IN 15TH WEEK, KING’S SPEECH REMAINS NO.1 ABROAD

After 15 weeks in theaters, Oscar winner The King’s Speech remained the top overseas attraction last week, according to media measurement company Rentrak Corp. The film added $18.02 million to its international gross, which now stands at $309.85 million. Disney’s Rango debuted in second place abroad with $14.76 million. Black Swan, which had its premiere […]

FLOPS BECOME HITS ON VIDEO-ON-DEMAND

Several of the movies that performed strongly as cable video-on-demand offerings during the week of July 26-August 1 were flops at the box office, figures released today (Monday) by VOD tracker Rentrak indicate. Although the No. 1 film on the top-ten list, Clash of the Titans, was a blockbuster hit, with $163.2 million in theatrical […]

WILL “SEQUELITIS” HARM SUMMER BOX OFFICE?

Following the poor Memorial Day performance by the box office, some analysts are expressing concern that the summer could turn out to be a loser for the studios. Today’s Hollywood Reporter suggested that the box office could be “plagued by a nasty case of sequelitis” and quoted an unnamed top studio executive as saying, “There […]

FOUR-WEEK DELAY NO HINDRANCE TO NETFLIX, REDBOX

The four-week delay in releasing new DVDs that studios have imposed on Netflix and Redbox has apparently not hurt either the online or the kiosk operator, according to Eric Wold, an analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford in New York. As reported by Home Media magazine, Wold, in a note to clients, observed that The Blind […]