Cineworld has reported a 33 per cent bump in revenues during the first half of the year, after its £900m takeover of European chain Cinema City.
Total revenues, including from Cinema City, reached £268.6m with profits adjusted for the costs of the takeover rising 46.2 per cent to £25.3m. Read more
Now TV, BSkyB's internet TV service, has launched an interactive digital-out-of-home campaign in the style of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole in cinemas across the UK.
The interactive game, called "Back In Your Box" and created by WCRS, features characters found on Now TV, emerging from boxes. Passersby must tap the characters on the screen to hit them back into "their box". Read more
The boys are back in town. If there was any doubt that the appetite to see Will, Simon, Jay and Neil back on the big screen had waned, that was dispelled in spectacular fashion last weekend as The Inbetweeners 2 debuted with the biggest opening weekend of the year so far. £12.5m is the biggest Wednesday to Friday performance and £8m from Friday to Sunday is the biggest three day opening of the year too. Although it’s a fantastic result, it is slightly down on the performance of the first Inbetweeners Movie in 2011, which opened with £13.2m for the five days and £8.6m from Friday to Sunday. That film went on to gross over £45m so the sequel will be looking at getting close to that.
Last week’s number one, Guardians of the Galaxy dropped to second with £3.3m for a very healthy cume of £13.9m. Its target has to be Marvel’s other film this year, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which finished on £19.4m. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes fell one place to third, adding £1.7m and has now grossed £27.1m. That puts it fractionally behind X-Men: Days of Future Past, which it will overtake at some point today (Monday) and become the second highest grossing film of the year to date. The Lego Movie looks to be safe in first with £34.2m. Read more
When the actor and comedian Robin Williams passed away on Tuesday, he left behind him a body of work that entertained and enthralled audiences in equal measure. It doesn't seem to matter who you speak to, everyone has their own favourite film from his long and successful career. Here the staff of DCM give their picks of his work and their reasons for choosing them.
Zoe Jones, Marketing Director, on Dead Poets Society: Read more
I had the great pleasure of attending the grand reopening of the Maxime Cinema, in Blackwood last week, another great addition to the Picturedrome Electric Theatre Company Ltd. portfolio of sites, owned by Adam Cunard.
Picturedrome have four other sites serviced by DCM; Picturedrome - Bognor Regis, Century Cinema - Clacton on Sea, Plaza - Dorchester and the Carlton Cinema - Westgate-on-Sea. Read more
Author: John Harlow, The Sunday Times
Hollywood is calling on female action heroes to win audiences back to the cinema. Ticket sales are down a record 18% this summer, and studios admit the picture would be far grimmer but for swashbuckling heroines such as Scarlett Johansson, Shailene Woodley and Zoe Saldana. Read more
Author: Adam Sherwin, The Independent
Ask viewers to name the most irritating advert on television and Go Compare’s campaign featuring a warbling opera singer regularly tops the list. Read more
The trailer for one of 2015’s most notorious films debuted online two weeks ago and has already broken records for the number of trailer views. The big screen adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey has been the source of much online chatter since it was announced last year and when the first sneak-peak finally landed in late-July, the chatter reached a record breaking crescendo.
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So it was time to say a tearful goodbye to the Hammersmith Riverside Studios. On Saturday 2nd August the cinema sadly conducted its final exhibition, showing Carol Reed's 1949 classic 'The Third Man' - another film has only this weekend made it into my personal top 10.
David Gothard, former Artistic Director for the site, and Shira Macloed, Riverside’s Cinema Director, welcomed a whole host of past and present collaborators and colleagues of the Hammersmith Riverside, as they gave a very moving introduction to the evening. They highlighting many of the amazing contributions the Riverside Studios has made to the industry over the last five decades. Read more
The Weekend Round-up
A new set of superheroes flew in this weekend and took the box office by storm. Six months ago, the Guardians of the Galaxy may not have been familiar to many of the UK’s cinemagoers but if their opening weekend of £6.4m is anything to go by, they will soon be household names. That figure includes £1.4m from Thursday previews but the Friday to Sunday total of £5m is the sixth highest opening weekend of the year, comfortably surpassing Marvel’s other 2014 release, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (£4.2m). Read more
I hate to bring attention to the fact that we’re closer to the end of summer than the start but let’s not focus on that and focus instead on the fact that the DCM fantasy film league is in its exciting latter stages. As you probably know by now, we asked participants to pick a selection of films from different categories that hit cinemas this summer. We then collate the opening week box office performance for each film and whoever has the highest total at the end of the summer wins a five star cinema experience in London. It should be easy, but predicting film performance rarely is and this summer has definitely sprung a few surprises.
Since the last update some of the summer’s biggest films have been unleashed in cinemas and have had a crack at toppling X-Men: Days of Future Past’s first week high of £14.8m. Of the newest contenders, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes came closest with £12.2m, which is the second highest opening week of the summer and a big improvement on the £8.6m Rise of the Planet of the Apes kicked off with in 2011. Read more
The Weekend Round-up
Apes remained strong at the top of the box office as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes added a further £3.8m. That figure is off 47% from its huge £7.1m opening last weekend and gives it a terrific cume of £17m. By this time next week it should have eclipsed Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ final total of £21m and will have firmly established a place on the top ten of the year-to-date. Read more
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