MUPPETEER JERRY NELSON, VOICE OF THE COUNT, HERRY MONSTER, OTHERS, DEAD AT 78

Jerry Nelson, who operated several of the puppets — or Muppets — and gave voice to The Count and Herry Monster on Sesame Street as well as dozens of other characters on the long-running PBS show, the syndicated The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and the Muppet movies, has died at his home in Cape Cod […]

NO LACK OF BUYERS FOR FAMILY FILMS ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

Family films continue to outperform on home video — the only bright spot on an otherwise dreary business. The latest evidence is the strong performance of Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, which easily captured the top spot on the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert chart for overall disc sales and […]

NEW YEAR’S EVE BALL FALLS WITH A THUD

Just when you thought the box office couldn’t get any worse than it got last weekend, it got worse. After recording its lowest gross of the year last week, it set a new low of $74 million, down nearly 9 percent from last weekend and the smallest total since September 2008. Then, however, it featured […]

FOX BUSINESS CHANNEL ACCUSES HOLLYWOOD OF BRAINWASHING KIDS

The Fox Business Channel, which has been struggling to find an identity to differentiate itself from rivals CNBC and Bloomberg, may be borrowing one from its sibling, the Fox News Network. The channel’s anchor Eric Bolling on Tuesday showed a clip from the Disney movie The Muppets in which the villain is an oil baron […]

BOX OFFICE: WORST WEEKEND OF THE YEAR

The weekend after the Thanksgiving holiday lived up to its reputation as a lowpoint of the year at the box office. But this one was even lower than usual, worse even than the weekend after the Labor Day holiday, before kids return to school. The total box office was down 6 percent from the same […]

MUPPETS FAIL TO BREAK BREAKING DAWN‘S HOLD ON FIRST PLACE (Updated)

Where’s Oscar the Grouch when you need him? Many box-office forecasters had predicted that this would be the weekend when Disney’s The Muppets took over first place from Summit Entertainment’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1. After all, they reasoned, Disney’s Tangled brought the last Harry Potter movie down over the same weekend […]

NO NEW MOVIES TO OPEN WIDE THIS WEEKEND

Given that the weekend after the Thanksgiving holiday is notoriously lame at the box office, studios this year have tossed in the towel: not one of them is opening a movie wide. Some have elected to widen a few films already in release and bring back a few Oscar contenders that were originally released earlier […]

THANKSGIVING BOX OFFICE DOWN

Moviegoers apparently didn’t get the message that they were supposed to lift the box office to a new Thanksgiving Day record over the weekend. To be sure, they turned out in force, but not in the numbers that pundits had forecast. As everyone had expected, the second week of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — […]

DAWN FAR FROM DEAD IN SECOND WEEK

There was still plenty of life in the undead over the Thanksgiving holiday, illustrated by the estimated $62.3 million that The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 brought in over the five-day period. The romvamp tale collected about $42 million over the three-day weekend (Friday through Sunday). Box office mavens regarded that result as […]

CRITICS GIVE THANKS FOR 3 NEW MOVIES (Updated)

At no time in memory have three films opened on the same day with as many positive reviews as those that are opening today. Critics are virtually unanimous in their praise of The Muppets, Hugo, and Arthur Christmas, all of them family films, and the latter two carrying 3D surcharges. Only The Muppets, however, is […]

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