SHOWBUZZDAILY EARLY WEEKEND BOXOFFICE REPORT – 9/22/12

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

This weekend’s boxoffice is something like a dead heat in a $5000 claiming race at a second-rate track.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE (Warners), END OF WATCH (Open Road) and HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (Relativity) are all claiming identical $13.2M totals for the weekend.  This means we won’t know who the real winner is until Sunday morning–and really until Monday, because the margin will be so close that it could be erased when final numbers come in the next day.  For the moment, the Saturday bumps claimed by the 3 movies are, respectively, 34%, 17% and 15%, which is consistent with the theory that Curve‘s older audience make it the least front-loaded of the titles.  But whoever “wins,” $13.2M is an unimpressive total, making for yet another so-so weekend at the boxoffice, as the lackluster recent months continue to eat up the gains of the year’s early hits.  Mitch Metcalf will have more about that tomorrow and Monday.

DREDD (Lionsgate) didn’t even pretend it was in the running for the weekend, with a 12% Saturday bump and an awful $6.3M weekend total.

THE MASTER (Weinstein), another film likely to appeal to an older audience, is reporting an impressive 54% Saturday increase that would bring its weekend to $4.7M, a good but not tremendous $6K per-theatre average.