Entertainment
Cinema, TV, music, theater, and the culture beat
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The Box Office’s Most Contested Months — and Why the Biggest Weekends Are the Least Competitive
When is the box office actually a fight? Not summer. The gap between No. 1 and No. 2 is widest in May (29 points) and tightest in January and August – because when a giant opens, it doesn’t compete, it clears the room. The real photo finishes happen in the quiet months.
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Does Owning the Box Office Actually Pay? The Return on Every Star Tier
Dominating the box office and making money aren’t the same question. Across twenty years, the median film returns 3.8x its budget at the Mini-geuse tier, 4.3x at Betelgeuse, and 6.0x at Geuse – but the single most profitable films are cheap horror originals that never reached the top.
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Star Wars Joins the 70mm Revival — and IMAX Says at Least Four More Secret Films Are Shooting on Film for 2027
The Odyssey proved the demand; now IMAX is filling the pipeline. CEO Rich Gelfond says at least four unannounced films will get a true 70mm release in 2027 — and the first revealed is Star Wars: Starfighter, shot on IMAX film for the saga’s 50th anniversary, plus a 70mm re-release of the 1977 original.
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The Premium Escalator: 98% of Box-Office Geuses Played in IMAX
1.618 vs IMAX’s 1.43 – two perfect rectangles. Sort event movies by domination and the IMAX rate climbs a clean staircase: 56% to 79% to 98%.
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The Perpetual Runner-Up: Twenty Years of No. 2 at the Box Office
Second place has its own twenty-year history. 406 films reached No. 2 at the U.S. box office and never once led a week — Oppenheimer among them, blocked by Barbie for a month. Inside the runner-up spot: the perpetual bridesmaids, the biggest blowouts, and the photo finishes.
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The Tier Pyramid: How the Golden Ratio Splits Twenty Years of Blockbusters
442 star movies, three golden-ratio tiers: 222 Mini-geuses, 163 Betelgeuses, just 57 Geuses. The shape of box-office domination – and whether the tiers themselves are golden.
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Do Video-Game Movies Finally Work? The Box-Office Verdict Is In
For thirty years, “video-game movie” was a punchline — shorthand for a film that would be critically savaged, commercially disappointing, and quietly forgotten. The curse was real and it was long. Then, sometime around the end of the last decade, it broke. Measure video-game adaptations the way the USA Times Star Index measures every film…
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The Second-Weekend Cliff: Does the Box Office Fall by the Golden Ratio?
The typical #1 film sheds about 32% of its box-office share in week two – tantalizingly close to the golden 38.2%. We tested whether the cliff is really golden.
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The 38.2% Club: The ‘Betelgeuses’ That Run the Box Office
Between the one-week Mini-geuses and the rare Geuses sits the workhorse tier: 163 Betelgeuses that took 38-62% of their week. The films that nearly took it all.
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The Almost-Stars: The Films That Missed Movie History by a Whisker
They led the box office and came within a fraction of a point of the star-movie line – and missed. The most agonizing near-misses of 20 years.