Box Office, Friday Box Office | featured news

Sony Pictures is saying this morning its 2012 opened as a runaway No. 1 with $23.7 million Friday, including $1M in Thursday midnights, for what's looking like a $61+M weekend.

FRIDAY PM/SATURDAY AM: If there's a Christmas-themed movie opening in November, then it's the official start of the holiday box office. In 1st place: Disney's A Christmas Carol. You may know it better as Charles Dickens' novel, but Disney had a problem with title rights, so now it's their pic. Hollywood predicted the 3-D family film to make at least $35M and possibly even $40M this weekend because of its wide release into 3,683 theaters domestically, including 2,035 3-D locations and 181 IMAX screens).

The big story this weekend is the pre-Halloween box office -- the horror, the horror of it all -- and how Saw VI, which has been a disgusting but reliably performing franchise over the years for Lionsgate, was decimated Friday by Paranormal Activity -- despite the Paramount phenom playing in 1,100+ less theaters during its 5th week of release.

Warner Bros didn't know what to expect on such a unique project as Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are since it couldn't find a single comp... Grosses looked to come in past $12M from 3,735 locations, including 145 Imax theaters. And now what even rival studios thought was at best a $30M weekend is "off and running" to go past $38M.

Sources tell me that Vince Vaughn's latest piece of dreck will make geniuses out of Universal's newly installed chairpeople. "Reason? Movies always do business after the studio heads get fired," one studio exec emailed me tonight.

Sony had a spectacular Friday at the box office. Not only did the Culver City studio notch its sixth number-one opener of the year with "Zombieland" at $9.4 million, but also filed second with holdover "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" which earned $3.7 million.

Sony toon earns $5.6 million, 'Surrogates' collects $5 million -- Friday moviegoers enjoyed a second helping of Sony’s 3-D toon "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," spending an estimated $5.6 million at 3,119 locales.