Entertainment
Cinema, TV, music, theater, and the culture beat
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Who Owns Christmas: Twenty Years of the Holiday Box Office, in One Chart
The last six weeks of the year are the box office’s crown jewels, and a very short list owns them. The most dominant holiday week in twenty years is Spider-Man: No Way Home at 86%, with Avatar: The Way of Water close behind – and appearing three times – plus the Star Wars sequels.
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The Bigger the Win, the Longer the Reign: How Long Each Box-Office Tier Holds the Throne
Owning the box office two weeks running is a different order of achievement than one – and it scales with size. Geuses reign 2.65 weeks on average, Betelgeuses 1.61, and Mini-geuses barely more than one, with 94% gone after a single week. Domination compounds.
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The Box Office Almost Never Slow-Burns: 98% of Star Movies Peak in Their First Week on Top
The sleeper hit that climbs for weeks is a myth. Across 442 star movies in twenty years, 98% hit their biggest week of market share the very first week they reached No. 1 – only ten ever climbed higher later, and even those were second-week vacuums, not long builds.
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Do Franchises Fade? The Data Says the Sequel Dominates Most
The received wisdom is diminishing returns. The domination data disagrees: the 2nd film peaks highest, and deep franchises stay strong – a sequel surge, and a survivorship trick.
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The Genre of Domination: Why Superhero and Sci-Fi Own the Box Office
Superhero and sci-fi films reach total domination 4x more often than any other genre. Animation wins on volume, horror wins cheaply, and fantasy never conquered at all.
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What 2026 Is Telling Us: The Year in Domination, and Where the Box Office Goes Next
2026 has already crowned 5 Phenomenons and handed the index its strangest anomaly in 20 years. The year so far, and what the golden ratio has taught us about where the box office is headed.
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Studio Wars: How Disney Annexed the Modern Box Office
Re-sort 20 years of box-office domination by studio and one name laps the field: Disney, with 28 Phenomenons and 164 weeks owned – about half the era’s total-domination events.
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The Golden-Ratio Hall of Fame: The 20 Most Dominant Films of the Last Twenty Years
The capstone ranking: the 20 films that owned a U.S. box-office week more completely than any others, led by Avengers: Endgame’s 88%. A monument to the winner-take-all era.
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A Moviegoer’s Map of New York’s Great Screens — and How to Get to Them
New York is one of the last cities on earth where the where of seeing a film is a genuine decision. On any given night you can catch a new release in the largest IMAX in the Northeast, a restored 1970s print in a West Village basement, a foreign premiere on the Lower East Side,…
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Why the Middle Film Wins: The Golden Section of the Perfect Trilogy
Empire, The Dark Knight, Aliens, Toy Story 2 – why is the second film so often the best? The darkest hour of a saga lands in its middle chapter, the trilogy’s golden section.