As Valentine’s Day nears, you would expect to see more romantic movies hitting the cinema. Instead, the big winners of the weekend turned out to be an off-kilter comedy and a decidedly unconventional love story. Identity Thief debuted as the top spot taker, the Jason Bateman/Melissa McCarthy comedy earning back its entire budget in a single weekend with an estimated $36.6 million, though critics a...[Read More]
The Detroit Film Critics Society (of which CinemaNerdz Editor in Chief Mike Tyrkus is a member) is pleased to announce the Best of 2012 winners in ten categories. The society was founded in spring 2007 and consists of a group of seventeen film critics who write or broadcast in the Detroit area as well as other major cities within a 150-mile radius of the city including Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Kal...[Read More]
The Detroit Film Critics Society (of which CinemaNerdz Editor in Chief Mike Tyrkus is a member) is pleased to announce the Best of 2012 nominees in ten categories. The society was founded in spring 2007 and consists of a group of seventeen film critics who write or broadcast in the Detroit area as well as other major cities within a 150-mile radius of the city including Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Ka...[Read More]
Note: Any estimate given in brackets represents how much the movie made over the five-day weekend; all other estimates represent the three-day weekend. While revenue over the three-day weekend may have been down from last week overall, Thanksgiving added a nice bit of revenue to the box office, with both The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 and Skyfall helping this weekend to be the highest ear...[Read More]
What more can be said? While The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 did not rise to the opening weekend numbers of New Moon, it certainly came close: the latest (and last) film in the series earned an estimated $141.3 million, more than enough for the series to end on a financial high note (having cost $120 million to make and $199.6 million in foreign box office alone). Critics may have been kin...[Read More]
It has been four years since James Bond last appeared in Quantum of Solace, and while it could not be said the last entry was any less than a box-office smash ($586 million worldwide) and got generally good reviews, MGM’s bankruptcy put the future of the franchise on hold for quite some time. However, it appears it was worth the wait…amid a flurry of good reviews, Skyfall also made good at the box...[Read More]
After last weekend’s lull, the box office returned to the sort of numbers typical for the year, thanks in part to a solid debut for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. The animated film brought in audiences in a way that the likes of Cloud Atlas (which landed at sixth this week and an estimated $5.3 million) and Silent Hill: Revelation (which came in tenth with an estimated $3.3 million) failed to do a week ...[Read More]
With three major new releases, it is a little surprising that only one ended up in the top three, and barely at that. Cloud Atlas, with an estimated $9.4 million, was the highest grossing of the new releases, but the ambitious multi-era epic only placed third overall, behind the current favorites Argo (an estimated $12.4 million) and Hotel Transylvania (an estimated $9.5 million). While grosses ar...[Read More]
For a movie costing only $5 million, a weekend estimate of $30.2 million would normally be a phenomenal thing…and to be fair, it still is…but for Paranormal Activity 4, that is a drop from the record-setting October release of the previous film, which did $52.3 million during the same weekend last year. Despite the lackluster reviews and diminished returns, the fourth film in the franchise stood a...[Read More]
The critics say Taken 2 is a simplistic rehash, but that has not stopped the movie-going public from making the Liam Neeson-helmed actioner top at the box office for a second week in a row. Its estimated $22.5 million puts the film into a domestic total of $86.8 million, a strong performance not only over its reported $45 million budget, but against almost any film during this quarter…with the exc...[Read More]