Cinema
Movies, film, and the business of cinema
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The Summer Kickoff: Who Owns the First Weekend of May
The summer movie season has a starting gun: the first weekend of May. For 20 years, Marvel has owned it – from Iron Man to the Avengers. The launch slot that defines the season.
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Films Worth Leaving the House For: The New Rules of the Big Screen
The question is no longer whether to see a movie. It is where. For the first time in a century of cinema, nearly every film is available two ways — in a theater now, or on a couch soon — and the choice between them has quietly become the most important decision a moviegoer makes.…
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The Most Dominant Year the Box Office Ever Had (It’s More Recent Than You Think)
By the measure of sheer domination, the peak year isn’t 1977 or 1999 – it’s 2022, when six separate films each seized 62% of a week. Why the record is so recent.
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Dinner, a Movie, and a Driver: The Quiet Return of the Proper Night Out
For a decade, the movies were something you did to yourself at home — a queue, a couch, a phone glowing in your other hand. But a certain kind of evening is coming back into fashion, and it is worth naming: the proper night out at the cinema, treated not as a chore to minimize…
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Sequels vs. Originals: Do Follow-Ups Really Dominate the Box Office More?
Sequels reach an average peak of 47.0% of their week; originals just 40.6%. The franchise advantage, measured – and the originals that beat it anyway.
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The Christmas Number One: Twenty Years of the Films That Owned the Holidays
The week between Christmas and New Year’s is the box office’s richest prize. Twenty years of holiday kings – Avatar, Star Wars, and a record-shattering Spider-Man.
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The Repertory Renaissance: Why New Yorkers Are Selling Out Films From Decades Ago
On a random Tuesday night in New York, you can find a line around the block for a movie that came out forty years ago. A restored print at Film Forum, a midnight cult screening at the Metrograph, a 70mm revival that sold out in minutes — the city’s repertory houses, long treated as a…
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The Oscar Paradox: Why the Year’s Best Picture Never Owns the Box Office
In 18 straight years, zero Best Picture winners dominated even one box-office week. How the money crown and the prestige crown split into two separate cinemas.
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Movies About the Number: Pi, The Da Vinci Code, and the Golden Ratio on Screen
From Donald Duck’s golden section to Pi’s paranoia to The Da Vinci Code’s Fibonacci plot – how the movies dramatize mathematics, and why they keep reaching for 1.618.
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The Vanishing Mid-Budget Movie: How the Box Office Became a Barbell
There used to be a kind of film that formed the backbone of Hollywood: the mid-budget movie for grown-ups. The forty-million-dollar thriller, the romantic drama with two stars and a good script, the mid-scale comedy — not a tentpole, not a micro-indie, just a solid professional film aimed at adults who go to the movies…