TIME WARNER SALES UP; SHARES DOWN

Home video sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 helped lift Time Warner’s second-quarter results above analysts’ expectations. Although the company’s Warner Bros. division spent heavily on pre-release marketing and publicity for the the theatrical release of Part 2 — dropping its operating margin slightly below that of the year-ago quarter — […]

KATZENBERG BLAMES HANGOVER FOR PANDA FALL

One might have supposed that the audiences for the raunchy comedy The Hangover: Part 2 and the family-friendly Kung Fu Panda 2 would be completely different. That apparently is also what DreamWorks Animation execs and chief Jeffrey Katzenberg supposed as well. But in reality, Katzenberg said during a conference call on Tuesday, when the films […]

TRANSFORMERS 3: BIGGEST MOVIE OF 2011

Transformers: Dark of the Moon officially became the top movie at the box office this year when it earned an additional $47.1 million in its second weekend to bring its domestic total to $261.1 million. It thereby replaced The Hangover: Part II in the top spot. Two other new — and relatively low-cost — films […]

WARNER INSTITUTES DELAY IN HUNGARY RELEASES

Warner Bros. has decided to delay the release of its films in Hungary after determining that a number of them that turned up on the Internet immediately after they were released were camcorded by pirates working out of theaters in that country. TorrentFreak.com, which tracks BitTorrent activity, speculated on Sunday that the studio had probably […]

FIRST CLASS DEBUT FOR X-MEN SEQUEL

X-Men: First Class performed as studio 20th Century Fox had expected, earning an estimated $56 million over the weekend. That figure was slightly below the $60-65 million that many industry forecasters had predicted — but a solid debut nevertheless. It was also greeted relatively warmly by critics, and audiences polled by CinemaScore as they emerged […]

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS STORMS IN

The box office is expected to cool off considerably this weekend. Only one new film is opening wide, 20th Century Fox’s X-Men: First Class. Box-office forecasters predict that it will sell about $55-60 million worth of tickets — about half what X-Men: The Last Stand took in ($105.8 million) when it opened in 2006, and […]

PIRATES LOOTS OVERSEAS BOX OFFICE

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides may not be the equal of the previous two Pirates sequels at the North American box office — but overseas it continues to rake in crates of doubloons (and other forms of cash). Last weekend the movie earned $108 million abroad to bring its worldwide gross to $571,302,759. […]

MORE HEADY RESULTS FOR THE HANGOVER II

Chalk up another record for The Hangover: Part II: fastest comedy to gross $200 million worldwide. While the final domestic tally came in slightly below studio estimates, the foreign total came in somewhat above. Warner Bros. put the 5-day domestic gross at $135 million and the overseas gross at $70.1 million, adding up to $205.1 […]

FOR WARNER BROS.: FIRST THE HANGOVER, THEN THE PARTY

TTalk about nursing a hangover! Moviegoers were doing just that in spades over the Memorial Day holiday as they spent $137.4 million between Thursday and Monday on The Hangover Part II, according to an estimate by Warner Bros. It marked the biggest gross for the debut of any R-rated comedy ever. While the film had […]

WITH THE HANGOVER, AUDIENCES SNUB CRITICS

The success of The Hangover Part II demonstrates once again how far removed film critics can be from the tastes of the audience. The divergence usually becomes particularly striking in the case of sequels. But today’s (Tuesday) London Independent observed, “While journalists may scoff at a director or producer sticking to a tried and tested […]

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