April 17th, 2012
This week's list of DVD and Blu-ray releases is dominated by Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The Blu-ray Combo Pack is worth picking up, but you'll want the Best Buy exclusive, or perhaps you want to tell studios to stop doing retailer exclusives, as they are annoying. That added complication is the reason I'm not awarding the release Pick of the Week, but there are not a lot of other films worthy either. Shame has two amazing performances, but the Blu-ray Combo Pack doesn't have a lot of extras. Fans of nature documentaries might want Frozen Planet: The Complete Series on Blu-ray or IMAX: Born to be Wild on 3D Combo Pack. But in the end, I went with the underseen The Last Rites of Joe May on DVD.
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April 12th, 2012
A quartet of family films made their Blu-ray debuts a couple weeks ago in advance of Easter. Easter isn't a big weekend at the box office, but since the celebration is centered around family dinners, it's a good time to give someone a movie to watch while at home. The four films that were released as part of this collection start with...
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March 6th, 2012
The number of big releases coming out this week can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The biggest theatrical release of the week is Immortals, but its reviews were weak enough that I think it might struggle on the home market in comparison. There are also a few catalog titles coming out on Blu-ray that are note-worthy, like To Catch a Thief. However, by far the biggest release, and the best, is Game of Thrones: Season One on DVD or Blu-ray, the latter of which is the Pick of the Week with To Catch a Thief not too far behind.
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June 24th, 2006
16 Blocks shared the top of the charts with
The Pink Panther.
16 Blocks led on the rental charts $6.85 million to $6.55 million, but the two films finished in opposite order on the sales charts.
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June 12th, 2006
It's another busy week both in terms of quantity and especially quality with half-a-dozen films in contention for DVD Pick of the Week. In the end I narrowed it down to The Dead Zone - The Complete Fourth Season, although I will probably end up buying all of them.
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May 7th, 2006
A pair of openings in major markets helped
Eight Below climb a spot to sixth with $5.05 million on 2129 screens in 24 markets for a total of $24.26 million so far. The film opened in France but could only manage sixth place with $1.85 million on 473 screens while in Spain it opened in first place, but only managed $981,000 on 224 screens. In the meantime, the film dipped just 4% during its second weekend in Australia adding $769,000 on 258 screens to its total of $2.29 million there.
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March 13th, 2006
Only one of the four new films beat expectations over the weekend, and that left the box office hurting.
Overall, the total for the weekend was $110 million, which was 6.8% higher than last weekend, but since last weekend was Oscar weekend, this is hardly an impressive result.
More importantly, it was 4.7% lower than the same weekend last year.
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March 6th, 2006
It was another bad week as practically ever film in the top five missed expectations, some by wide margins. The overall box office was down to $103 million for the weekend, which is 14.2% lower than last weekend and 16.3% lower than the same weekend last year. However, a lot of that has to do with the
Oscars. Year-to-date, 2006 has brought in $1.39 billion in box office revenue, which is just behind last's years pace of $1.40 billion.
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March 3rd, 2006
It's Oscar weekend and while people will be celebrating the best movies have to offer, they won't be doing it in a movie theatre. There's usually a huge drop-off in ticket sales over Oscar weekend, especially on Sunday. The only groups that are mostly unaffected are teens and young men and that explains why all four movies opening wide this weekend are aimed at one of those two groups.
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March 2nd, 2006
During the past week promotional websites for several movies were launched and some older ones added additional content. There was a three way race for top spot this week with
Slither -
Official Site taking home the award. However, it won based on equal parts what it is and what it should become once all the content marked coming soon is added to the site.
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March 1st, 2006
This is a not as busy a month as it initially looks. Granted, there are 18 movies on this month's list, but there are five weekends, or at least five Fridays. Also, every week there's at least one film that may or may not be getting a truly wide release. Considering the level of competition, I'm leaning against any of five such films opening in more than 2000 theatres. On the plus side, we should see the
first $100 million movie of 2006 open this month, and perhaps even see
two movies reach that milestone.
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February 23rd, 2006
During the past week promotional websites for several movies were launched and some older ones added additional content. Just when I thought the slump was over, we have the shortest list in a few weeks. The best site of the week was
Brick -
Official Site, which helped sell the movie well and that is the most important job of a movie site.
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