Latest in The BFG

UPDATE, WRITETHRU with actuals: Sony's Inferno sparked to a strong $50M offshore opening this frame to lead the international and worldwide box office two weeks ahead of its domestic bow. Aided by the continued performance of Fox's Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, along with some solid holdovers and a…

7TH UPDATE, Monday 5:20 PM: This weekend, Illumination Entertainment further proved it’s not just an animation label relegated to a Russian-speaking villain and yellow Tic-Tac guys as The Secret Life Of Pets came in well above its weekend estimates with $104.35 million gross, the sixth-best opening in July and second…

EXCLUSIVE: Despite a lackluster summer and a meh Fourth of July weekend, this past holiday ended up the fourth-best three-day holiday weekend in 21 years — up 40% from last year. How is that even possible? Well, given that the calendar year fell on a Monday, Sunday basically performed like a Saturday and the diversity…

TUESDAY FINAL UPDATE, 2:30 PM: Blame it on the good weather across the country, an unusually competitive weekend with family titles and a basic lack of interest in the product, but we have some certifiable duds on our hands this Fourth of July including one from brandmaster Steven Spielberg himself. Shouldering…

4th WRITE-THRU, Saturday 8:36AM: Given how lucrative Valentine's Day, Easter and April have lately proven to be as tentpole launches for Deadpool, Batman v. Superman and The Jungle Book, it's a wonder whether more traditional summer slots like the Independence Day and Memorial Day weekends even matter anymore. Last…

Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr. worked together for two decades at Daily Variety. In this weekly column, two old friends get together and grind their axes, mostly on the movie business. BART: Here's the prevailing wisdom about summer box office: Filmgoers are exuberant about a couple of new releases (Finding Dory) but…

This isn’t the Independence Day weekend of Transformers, Twilight, Spider-Man or even Will Smith, but it will be the holiday that belongs to Disney’s Finding Dory. For a second year in a row, a Pixar holdover will rule the July 4th box office with Dory making between $45 million-$50 million over four days. Last year…

The creative mix for new fantasy film The BFG is about as magical a recipe for movie success as you can have. Take three major brands like Disney, Steven Spielberg and Roald Dahl and you have a kid-friendly flick that should delight families everywhere. In fact, as I say in my video review above, it is rather…

Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr. worked together for two decades at Daily Variety. In this weekly column, two old friends get together and grind their axes, mostly on the movie business. BART: Celebrity intrigue seemed to dominate Cannes coverage last week just as celebrity news confiscated political coverage in the…

Steven Spielberg’s The BFG got a 4 1/2-minute standing-O at its Cannes premiere Saturday night, and today Disney released a new trailer for the pic. “Please don’t eat me!” begs the little girl of the enormous dude who reached through her bedroom window and snatched her up. “You think because I’m a giant that I’m a…

Steven Spielberg hit Cannes again and it was a return worth celebrating. It has been a very long time coming — 1993 to be exact, when Roald Dahl’s children’s book The BFG was first optioned — but this master director, working again in the fantasy genre, pulls off a movie worth the wait. Saturday night at the Grand…

“I think it was one of the first books that I read by myself in my head,” says award-winning actress Rebecca Hall about the Roald Dahl book Steven Spielberg is bringing to the big screen. “I believed when I was nine years old that I was Sophie, the little girl.” One of the out-of-competition Hollywood highlights here…