This graph shows Florence Pugh’s score on our annual analysis of leading stars at the box office. The Star Score represents points assigned to each of the leading stars of the top 100 movies (based on box office) in the current year and two preceding years. For appearing in the number one movie in a year a star gets 100 points, the number two movie 99 points and so on..
Latest Ranking on Selected Box Office Record Lists
As another weekend approaches, another new arrival takes over as the widest release of the week. Releasing in more theaters than originally projected, Don’t Worry Darling makes its theatrical entrance in a robust 4,113 locations this week, which is more than enough to overtake last week’s widest release and box office number one, The Woman King, as the latter keeps its opening count of 3,765 theaters from its inaugural week. Don’t Worry Darling technically isn’t the only new wide release of the week, as On the Come Up hits the scene by playing in 603 cinemas. Mega-hit Avatar is being re-released in 1,860 locations prior to its successor, Avatar: The Way of Water’s December 16th launch.
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Our annual Oscar Prediction contest underway so now is the best time to look at the nominees and try to figure out who the favorites are and which films should just feel honored to be nominated. We are continuing today with Best Supporting Actress. In this category, there is an absolute favorite, a long shot with a shot, and then everyone else.
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The Oscar nominations were announced on Monday, and the results were... well, there were some puzzling results. Joker led the way with eleven nominations. ... A film with 69% positive reviews earned the most nominations. It’s not the worst-reviewed movie to earn a Best Picture Nomination—after all, Bohemian Rhapsody was nominated just last year. However, this film is arguably the worst-reviewed movie to ever earn the most nominations in a single year.
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Frozen II wasn’t the only box office hit to debut in November, but it was by far the largest. It helped save November and kept 2019 from turning completely sour at the last minute. As for December, we have several potential $100 million hits, plus a couple of monster hits. There are some who think Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will be the biggest domestic hit released in 2019, but most think it will have to settle for second place. Jumanji: The Next Level should also be a monster hit, even if it doesn’t come really close to its predecessor. As for last December, Aquaman was the undisputed champion, earning almost as much as the next twofilms combined. Jumanji could top Aquaman at the box office, while we could also have more $100 million films than we had last year. Add in Star Wars and the year should end on a really positive note, making up for the extended slumps we had to deal with through a lot of the year. 2019 won’t be able to close the gap entirely, but it will do enough that we will be able to celebrate.
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Midsommar is writer / dirctor Ari Aster’s second film. His first, Hereditary, only managed a D plus from CinemaScore, which is bad, even for a horror film. However, CinemaScore tends to measure not just quality, but expectations. A good movie that doesn’t match audience expectations in terms of tone and subject matter tend to get very weak scores from CinemaScore and no one going into Hereditary day one could have know what to expect. Midsommar earned a C plus, which is actually about average for a horror film. Is it also merely average in quality? Or is it just not as accessible as most mainstream horror movies are?
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The BAFTA nominations were announced and this time The Shape of Water led the way with 12 nominations. The same films appear on many of the lists of nominees, but so far no one film has come to dominate the list. This makes it interesting, to say the least. There’s a good chance no one film will win the majority of prestige awards and that multiple films will have lots of reason to celebrate on February 18th when the awards are handed out.
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Both the first installment First-run Releases and the second installment, TV on DVD releases, were shorter than I would have liked, as this hasn’t been a great year for either wide releases or TV on DVD releases. That said, the third installment of our Holiday Gift Guide deals with limited releases, classics, and foreign imports and this list can get out of hand rather quickly. There will more releases on this list than the previous two, starting with...
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It is one of those weeks. There’s a massive release coming out, which has scared away nearly all of the competition, so it is a really shallow week. Fortunately, that huge release is Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is not only one of the biggest hits of the year, it is also one of the reviewed. It isn’t the only contender for Pick of the Week, but the Blu-ray Combo Pack wins that honor.
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There’s not a wide selection of films coming out in limited release this week, but there are number of them that are worth checking out. This includes To The Bone, which is playing on Netflix right now. Endless Poetry is about the early life of Alejandro Jodorowsky and fans of his movies should be very interested. Lady Macbeth is a costume drama and that’s a genre that tends to do well in limited release. Finally there’s Swallows and Amazons, a family film that will likely do much better on Video on Demand than in theaters.
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