The Box Office Podcast

Cinema United and friends spent the entire week listening to studios pledge their loyalty to theatrical exhibition, while theater owners implicitly reaffirmed the commercial and cultural value of the big screen. A day later, the Generation Z-targeted A Minecraft Movie  opened so overwhelmingly above even optimistic projections that it single-handedly made the case for them. So yes, Scott and Jerem...

Pardon the tardiness for this one, I made a losing bet with myself that I’d have time to put this one out amid the week spent in Las Vegas at CinemaCon. Action For Everyone podcast host Mike Scott joins us to discuss Jason Statham’s latest commercial triumph as well as the cultural circumstances that have changed so that the kids no longer go up for “cool movies for cool kids” flicks like Death of...

Kristen Acuna, formerly of Business Insider, a longtime entertainment/business journalist and a comparative Disney expert, drops by to discuss what went terribly wrong with the fairest of them all. But just because most of the chat concerns Snow White doesn’t mean we’re going to let David Zaslav off the hook for emphasizing a ruthless “It’s called show business, not show friends.” mentality and th...

Everything is terrible, and everyone is hurting. That’s the general sentiment as longtime film critic, podcaster and friend-of-Scott Mendelson (don’t hold that last one against him)Aaron Neuwirth guest-stars to try and bring some light into the darkness of an unusually bleak weekend at the domestic box office. Hollywood is (finally?) offering more small-scale studio programmers, but audiences are...

There wasn’t all that much to discuss this weekend beyond the circumstances of Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 opening with just $19 million in North America. But since we have a whole show to fill, Brandon Peters (veteran podcaster and film pundit and longtime friend of Scott Mendelson) stopped in to sort through the carnage. Among other topics are…- Robert Pattinson’s limited drawing power- The challen...

Since there really isn’t much box office news to discuss, we spent the entire show discussing the Oscar season that just ended. Lisa Laman explained the commercial realities that helped make Anora the lowest-earning Best Picture winner since The Hurt Locker in 2010. Jeremy Fuster argued that it was more important for the Academy Awards to honor the “best” movies of the year even at the cost of rem...

Brandon Katz of The Observer and Parrot Analytics serves as our special “fourth participant” with whom we discuss how badly Marvel has messed up (or been undermined by corporate overlords) in the post- Avengers: Endgame  transition to Disney+ television, why  The Monkey  is performing well outside of comparisons to breakouts like  Longlegs  and  M3GAN and whether Amazon MGM Studios will unnecessar...

Scott Mendelson, Jeremy Fuster and Lisa Laman pontificate on why a $101 million Friday-Monday debut isn’t great news for  Captain America: Brave New World  and could be terrible news for the theatrical industry, which is banking on the MCU tentpole to deadlift the entire first quarter. Concurrently, longtime LA journalist vet and before-it-was-cool geek culture expert Luke Y. Thompson is our speci...

This weekend, we will discuss a disappointing Super Bowl weekend in North America (RIP  Heart Eyes  and  Love Hurts ), why  Companion  struggled to find post-debut momentum, and the consistently strong performance of  Ne Zha 2  in China. Additionally, we spent the second half of the show answering a few listener emails, so keep those coming. Get full access to The Outside Scoop at scottmendelson.s...

This weekend’s episode goes to the Dog(s), Man. Jeremy Fuster couldn’t make it, but Lisa Laman and Scott Mendelson welcome Kenny Miles to this week’s episode to discuss both the new releases ( Companion and Dog Man ) in a general sense and share his experiences and opinions related to his work as a CinemaScore pollster. We all agree that actually polling folks walking out of the movie on opening n...

The actual box office news is comparatively light, so this somewhat became an accidental three-part episode. In the first act, Scott Mendelson, Lisa Laman and this week’s special guest star (Chrissi Michael, natch) discussed the ups and downs of the top ten and the various ways in which younger viewers ingest pop culture. The second act, during which Jeremy Fuster pops in a bit late but not too la...

As the sad Poe image implies, former co-host Ryan Scott is back, at least for one episode. They never found the body; he fixed the autopilot six months ago, an enraged Superboy punched the space-time continuum or whatever a bunch of times, and/or the entire last season was a dream. Either way, we hope for a few more Ryan Scott guest appearances over the next year to the extent his schedule allows....

In what was the first “new” weekend of 2025, Den of Thieves 2 opened seven years after its predecessor with an almost identical amount of money in North America. For the special occasion, The Box Office Podcast welcomed the one and/or only Brandon Streussnig to discuss Vulture’s third annual “Stunt Awards” along with Gerard Butler’s B-level stardom, the nuanced politics of seemingly simplistic gri...

Since there were no newbies of note this weekend, all due respect to Vertical’s The Damned , Scott Mendelson, Lisa Laman and Jeremy Fuster just talked about the holdover business and that pesky “fewer movies than theaters were once accustomed to” issue that still seems to be in play five years after the start of the COVID pandemic. The good news is that Mufasa: The Lion King is legging like a cham...

In what will be the last episode of 2024, the three proverbial box office musketeers/amigos/etc. are joined by Daniel Loria for a deep dive into what went right over the holiday weekend and why it’s exactly the kind of “everybody wins” frame exhibitors and theatrical proselytizers have been waiting for since, well, even before the COVID era of multiplex melodrama.  Mufasa: The Lion King  and  Soni...

After appearing on all 46 of the first episodes of The Box Office Podcast (even the late June episode where it was just her and Ryan holding down the fort), Lisa Laman had to sit this one out. She’ll be back for episode 48, so you can listen to me roll my eyes at all the Nosferatu nonsense *and* shudder at the hardcore deep-dive Sonic the Hedgehog nerdery in one single episode. This time, however,...

* It’s basically the “all Kraven and all The War of the Ro…hru…ru… how the f**k do I pronounce that again?” as the Box Office Podcast podcasts about the box office of this weekend’s epic commercial losers. * Lisa lays out just how awful the opening weekend for Kraven really was. * Jeremy rages at the absurdity of offering an anime film with subpar animation to an audience that expects visual panac...

Weirdly enough, there were well over a dozen new releases this weekend, even if it a few of them made anything resembling “money” in terms of domestic grosses. Nonetheless, this episode offers a slew of tangents including… * The comparative cultural rehabilitation of Chris Nolan’s Interstellar, at least in terms of online nitpicking versus critical and real-world approval * The value of putting ol...

Moana 2 shattered Thanksgiving weekend records with a sky-high $225 million Wed-Sun debut, right alongside Wicked Part One ’s equally impressive $118 million Wed-Sun *non-opening weekend*. Oh, and Gladiator II kept up with the competition, relatively speaking, as it showed that there’s room in the moviegoing marketplace for more than one — or even two — big-deal franchise-friendly mega-budget tent...

The conventional wisdom that Wicked Part One ’s $112 million opening destroyed (audiences don’t mind musicals, and they don’t mind the whole “part 1 of 2” thing) and whether a $55 million domestic debut is good enough for the pricy Gladiator II (which, inflation aside, is relatively high for an R-rated action movie not based on a comic book). Meanwhile, some digressions related to Moana II ’s upco...

It is a tale of two franchise-friendly $250 million tentpoles and to what extent the streamer deserves nuance and mercy for a domestic and global opening weekend that would be an outright disaster for a legacy studio. Sure, Red One was greenlit and budgeted for streaming, but why make excuses for the very streaming companies that helped undercut the legacy studios’ ability to release non-franchise...

We all try to distract ourselves by discussing the long-game value of Christmas movies and the coming triple-whammy of Gladiator II, Wicked Part One,  and  Moana II , which will help bring the overall year-end closer to 2023 than any of us dared hope back in January. You can also enjoy our wildly off-topic discussions about what Hollywood tried to make in the 2010s. From here on out, Timothée Chal...

Ryan had to skip out on this episode, so it’s just Scott, Lisa and Jeremy talking shop. We spend half the episode discussing the good news ( Venom 3, Anora, Conclave , etc.) and the bad news ( Here, Juror #2, Absolution ). The second half is a listener mailbag episode, including some very macabre conversations about potential Pixar sequels and why The Good Dinosaur 2 should be a cross-over/combo s...

Venom: The Last Dance is more evidence that the late-2010s Marvel/DC superhero boom has ended, with the sub-genre now as execution-dependant as any other franchise film. Still, a $120 million threequel that will probably clear $400 million worldwide allows Sony a graceful off-ramp for their decade-long efforts to make Spider-Man’s rogues gallery into their own cinematic universe. Get full access t...

Smile 2 showed that you don’t have to be a breakout sequel to be a successful follow-up, while Terrifier 3 was no one-weekend wonder. Joker 2 plunged again while Wild Robot and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice shrugged off PVOD availability and Anora notched the second-biggest per-theater average in five years. Meanwhile, a dive into the listener feedback bag led to some spirited debates about the decline...