I was somewhat embarrassed that my initial prediction for Star Trek‘s opening weekend was far off the mark. Given the movie’s decent reviews however (95% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer), I still believed that the movie would have better returns during its second weekend. Normally movies with positive reviews earn a higher gross at the box [...]

According to a Variety article that I commented on yesterday, during the past four years new sources of funding like private equity money have created a ‘surplus of movies’ that are forcing Hollywood to release ‘heavyweight’ movies across a wider spectrum of dates, other than on just around Easter, summer and the year-end holidays. During [...]

2009 could mark the first year that Hollywood breaks $10 billion in total U.S. Box Office sales. As of March 16, the total gross revenues are at $2.089 billion, 12.4% over the same point in 2008. If this pace is maintained, total U.S. Box Office will reach $10.771 billion by year end. A January article [...]

This past weekend Watchmen opened with an estimated $55.7 million. This is the sixth largest opening for an R-rated film, and the twelfth-largest for a movie adapted from a comic book. Still, Watchmen was heavily hyped and was expected to open stronger given its similarity to 300, another Warner Bros. comic book movie also directed by Zach [...]

In late January I did an analysis of Slumdog Millionaire, of its unique distribution and resulting ticket sales. Given the movie’s eight Oscar wins, I wanted to do an update on its box office performance. Most important has been Fox’s steady buildup in the movie’s distribution, which has taken place in four major points. November [...]

I recently saw this posting on TV By the Numbers regarding the historical ratings of the Oscars. Much has been made over how the event’s ratings are tied to how popular the nominated movies are so I decided to take a closer look. Since TV By the Numbers had the ratings information for all the [...]

This posting is the third part of a series focusing on 2008′s top 100 movies.The first posting presented the movies, as ranked by their total U.S. box office gross. The second posting investigated the link between their box office performance and critical reviews. This third posting will take a look at their production budgets and [...]

This posting is the second part of a series focusing on 2008′s top 100 movies, ranked by total U.S. box office gross. As many of the top earners like The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Wall-E received favorable reviews I wanted to check out the link between a ‘quality’ movie and box office success. To [...]

For some time now I’ve been compiling a ton of data for last year’s top movies. I was initially curious about comparing box office performance to critical reviews (more on that later), but during my research I also came across some other interesting trends. So, who are the ‘hits’ I studied? I decided to limit [...]

I recently went to see Slumdog Millionaire; it’s a wonderful movie about an Indian teen named Jalim, who has grown up in the slums of Mumbai, and who we quickly find out is a contestant on India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He’s managed to do well on the show but due [...]