Interesting to see how the Hollywood studios are trying to combat the holiday clutter and the box office slump. Sony and Paramount and Warner Bros bigwigs are overseas pushing product like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. Since they all know the international market can more than make up for disappointing domestic numbers. Harvey Weinstein and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are personally publicizing their holiday movies/awards contenders My Week With Marilyn and The Artist, Hugo, The Adventures Of Tintin and War Horse, knowing that the media can’t resist an opportunity to promo their sound bites. But over at Twentieth Century Fox, the powers-that-be have scheduled still more Saturday night sneaks of Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo this weekend in 800 across the U.S. and Canada even though pic doesn’t officially open until December 23rd. The studio’s belief seems to be that word of mouth this holiday season will be key to winning the box office derby. Even rival studios were telling me that the approximately 800 sneaks of We Bought A Zoo over Thanksgiving were sizzling. Sellouts were reported in markets from New York to LA, Minneapolis to Memphis, Salt Lake City to Boston, Detroit to Orlando, Philly to Kansas City… Apparently exit scores were over 995 in all quadrants with laughter and tears common. Audiences were multi-generational, both family and non-family alike.

Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.