Film

THURSDAY UPDATE, Refresh for latest…: With numbers now in for the 44 overseas markets that opened on Wednesday, Illumination/Nintendo/Universal’s The Super Mario Bros Movie had a more than peachy debut with $34.7M through yesterday at the international box office. Combined with Wednesday’s domestic bow, the global one-day total is $66.4M. Several milestones/records were set in

Elizabeth Banks genre comedy, Cocaine Bear, will be debuting on Universal’s streaming service Peacock 50 days after its theatrical debut. The movie is based on a true situation that went down in 1985 whereby a drug cartel’s lost cocaine stash air dropped in the Georgia woods, and wound up in a bear’s nose. Cocaine Bear

Owen Wilson is back, with brushes, as the longtime host of a beloved but fading Burlington, Vermont-based PBS instructional art show. Paint from IFC Films opens on 800+ screens. Public television is always ripe for parody and happens to be a world Wilson knows. His father Robert Wilson helped launch, and ran, Dallas PBS station

Universal Pictures, Atomic Monster and Blumhouse’s Night Swim is now opening on Jan. 5, 2024 instead of Jan. 19. That first weekend of the New Year is a highly coveted spot for horror movies. That’s where Blumhouse/Universal’s M3GAN opened to $30.4M and went on to gross $95M. Night Swim logline: No running. No diving. No

Illumination/Nintendo/Universal’s Super Mario Bros Movie doesn’t need a mushroom to get bigger, it just organically is. Out of the gate today Wednesday, sans any Tuesday previews, the feature take of the classic game is looking at $26M, for what’s translating into a $86.2M 3-day, $127.5M Wednesday through Sunday haul. Interesting, even though its opening day

Regal owner Cineworld has entered into a restructuring support agreement and a backstop commitment agreement with lenders that will, if approved, see it emerge from bankruptcy. The exhibition giant also noted today that it has received non-binding proposals for some or all of the group’s assets but determined that absent an all-cash bid significantly in

Refresh for latest…: Coming in higher than expected, Paramount/eOne’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves took a $71.5M global bow this weekend; that includes $33M from 60 offshore markets which is nicely above the $25M+ projected ahead of the frame. Standout markets included the UK (where eOne distributes) at No. 1 with $4.3M; Mexico and

In the latest episode of Crew Call, we talk to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves directors, scribes and EPs John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein about the vision they sold to Paramount to make the dark and dingy world of the role playing game, not just fun, but funnier. And even more so, a

Saturday AM: Refresh for more updates and chart Though Friday was $15.3M, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is still looking at a $40M opening. This is the high end of tracking, and that is to be commended for the Paramount/eOne $150M production which the former studio was careful to lay off risk on. Though

National CineMedia said today it’s negotiated a second extension of the grace period on interest payments originally due Feb. 15. A one-month grace period for a payment said to be about $6.6 million ended March 15, when the company announced lenders had agreed to another 17 days. Big ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P Global declared

As the new crop of 2023 festival favorites roll out, Focus Features presents A Thousand And One in over 900 carefully curated theaters, testing the appetite for specialty fare at a challenging moment. Short film and video director A.V. Rockwell’s feature-length debut stars Teyana Taylor as free-spirited Inez, who kidnaps her six-year-old son Terry from

Lionsgate Motion Picture Group Chair Joe Drake had much to celebrate this morning. The studio reaped a record global and domestic box office debut for the John Wick franchise, with John Wick: Chapter 4 making $137.5M WW and $73.5M. The fourthquel was the best-received John Wick of all-time with audiences (A CinemaScore) and critics (95%

Broadway’s The Phantom of the Opera had yet another smashing, down-to-the-wire week at the Majestic, grossing more than $3 million for the second consecutive week as the countdown to its April 16 closing continues. Meanwhile, another villainous character – the bloodthirsty killer of the ecstatically reviewed Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street –

Paramount and Hasbro eOne with the greatest of intentions have created an extremely fun, broad-audience appealing feature take on the classic roleplaying game, entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which already is 90% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes –not an easy feat with a genre movie of this caliber– and 94% with moviegoers. Paramount

An attorney for bankrupt movie theater chain Cineworld said today it has “several” interested parties eyeing its business in “rest of world” — meaning Europe outside the UK, and Israel — but nothing pending for the entire company, or, it seems for Regal in the U.S. Final bids are due April 10, said Joshua Sussberg

Disney’s live-action take on The Little Mermaid has been cleared for theatrical release in China, as has Fast X — the penultimate installment in Universal’s long-running Fast & Furious action franchise. Dates are still to be set for both films in the market which has increasingly been handing out day-and-date releases for Hollywood titles even

EXCLUSIVE: Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Hollywood swore off the booming and lucrative box office territory, with the first studios, Disney and Warner Bros, respectively pulling their big movies out of the country, Turning Red and The Batman. However, this past weekend, Lionsgate’s John Wick: Chapter 4 made it through

Refresh for latest…: It was a bow-wow-wow! start for Lionsgate/Thunder Road Films/87 Eleven’s John Wick: Chapter 4 with $137.5M global this session. Of that, $64M is estimated from 71 international box office markets. All were No. 1 starts and cumulatively are 73% above John Wick 3 – Parabellum’s 2019 launch. This is a fantastic debut