Editor
The lead news file and the weekly column: studio decisions, the numbers underneath them, and what they cost the people who have to live with them.
Pooja Entertainment UK Limited's statement of affairs, filed on 17 September, puts its debts at £10,085,267.92. A single creditor in the United Arab Emirates accounts for £8,752,652.35 of it.
Avatar's $2,923,710,708 contains $180,133,121 its original release did not earn. Avengers Endgame: Encore has taken $86,106,643 back in three days, and needs $38,164,965 more.
La Bola Negra sold 613,240 tickets in Spain for €4,673,201, an average of €7.62 a head against a market average of €7.75. Avengers: Endgame Encore, second in the same chart, averaged €8.60.
A24's Primetime opened to $8,494,586 on Friday, against $7.7m for Mickey 17's first day in March 2025. One cost a reported $15m, the other $118m. Per screen, the cheap one is winning by 46%.
Endgame Encore took $11.2m on Friday against the original's $157.5m opening day, and is heading for $26m. Avatar's entire ten-day 2022 re-release made $24.7m.
Tiny Ltd closed Friday at a market capitalisation of US$117m. Its 60% stake in Letterboxd is being marketed at $300m, which works out at $9.77 a member, against the $458 a head the New York Times Company paid for The Athletic.
Paramount Skydance closed at $10.18 on Thursday. The equity syndicate funding the Warner Bros. Discovery takeover pays no less than $12.00, a gap of about $7.1bn across the full $46.95bn commitment. Elon Musk is one of the names discussed for it.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's six theatrically reported features have grossed $878.6m worldwide between them. Digger, which premiered in London on Tuesday as this year's Royal Film Performance, needs around $310m on its own just to get level.
Resident Evil's $8m-$9m in previews is more than Welcome to Raccoon City took in its entire opening weekend. Applying the preview multiples of Weapons and Mortal Kombat II gives a $59m-$68m opening; the tracking says $40m-$50m. Here is the arithmetic, and why it may still be wrong.
Canada put C$23m behind TIFF: The Market over three years. Year one confirmed more than 130 buyers who were not already coming, which works out at about C$59,000 each. Toronto now has around 930 buyers against Cannes's 1,700 and Berlin's 1,794.
Obsession was made for $750,000 and has taken $513.8m worldwide. It sits seventh on the 2026 domestic chart, ahead of every Disney release this year except Toy Story 5, and its opening weekend alone returned 23 times its budget.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has passed The Force Awakens' $936,662,225 to become the biggest domestic release ever. Divide each gross by the price of a ticket in its year and the new record holder sold about 70 million seats against 111 million. It also took a bigger share of its year's cinemagoing than Star Wars did.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day stands at $935,170,888 in North America, $1,491,337 behind The Force Awakens. It lost the top spot this weekend and will take the all-time domestic record anyway, probably by Wednesday.
The Odyssey has taken $593.1m in North America and $1.65bn worldwide. One of those records is real and one is an artefact of pricing, and the difference is $296 million.
Susanne Bier's sequel reunites Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman 28 years on. The reviews are poor, the previews were not, and the studio is about to find out which one the audience believes.
Venice announced a 20-film competition with one female director. Alberto Barbera blamed the quality of submissions. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who chairs the jury, asked who gets to decide.
Netflix paid $587m for an AI company, SAG-AFTRA wrote synthetic performers into its contract and the Oscars now demand human authorship. Here is where the rules stand.
Spider-Man won at home over Labor Day. The Odyssey won the world. Now it needs about $43 million more to pass Jurassic World as Universal's highest grosser.
Summer 2026 set a US record of $4.76 billion and the year is within reach of $10 billion. The clearest explanation is not a change in appetite, it is a change in release count.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 took $77m domestically and $233.6m worldwide on its opening weekend. The exit polling is the part worth reading.