Note: all holdovers will show unusually sharp Friday-to-Friday declines due to Valentine’s Day last week, and should recover somewhat over the course of the weekend.
OPENINGS: 3 DAYS TO KILL (Relativity), with a $4M Friday and likely $12M weekend, won’t accomplish its goal of establishing Kevin Costner as the next elder statesman action-hero a la Liam Neeson. But the budget (not counting marketing) was a reportedly reasonable $28M and the setting is Paris, so it can hope to be a wash in the US and at least hit breakeven overseas.
The only survivor of POMPEII (TriStar/Sony/FilmDistrict) may be its US distributor, after a disastrous $3.4M Friday that may not get it to $10M for the weekend. Financier Neue Constantin is reportedly on the hook for the $100M (!) budget, and FilmDistrict is paying for the US marketing, so TriStar is a distributor-for-hire that will be happy enough to collect its fee and walk–make that run–away, as the movie hopes not to get buried under volcanic ash overseas.
HOLDOVERS: Cue the “Everything is Awesome” music, as THE LEGO MOVIE (Warners) will romp to its third consecutive victory with a $7.3M Friday and a weekend that will likely exceed $30M. Warners has already announced a 2017 opening for the inevitable sequel–but writer/directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord aren’t writing the script, which makes the prospect less enticing.
Of last weekends openings, ROBOCOP (Sony/MGM) held up best as a non-romance, down “just” 62% from last Friday to $2.6M and a likely $8.5M weekend. That will give it around $43M in the US, still an unimpressive total for movie with a production and worldwide marketing budget over $200M, and while not the catastrophe that Pompeii is, it will also need to be much more successful overseas than it’s been here.
The Valentine’s Day romances all collapsed, down 80% or more from last Friday. They were again led by ABOUT LAST NIGHT (Screen Gems/Sony), with $2.3M on Friday and $7.5M for the weekend, heading to what now looks like a $50-60M final landing–still very solid for a moderately-budgeted comedy, but nowhere near Kevin Hart’s breakout hits. ENDLESS LOVE (Universal) had only $1.5M on Friday for a $4.5M weekend and a total that probably won’t reach $30M (less than the original movie made 33 years ago), and WINTER’S TALE (Warners) is a calamity, with $670K on Friday, a weekend of perhaps $2M and no more than $15M at the US box office.
Veterans still selling tickets include THE MONUMENTS MEN (Sony/20th) down 55% from last Friday to $2.3M, and still heading for $70-75M at the US box office, giving it a chance to find some profit overseas; the unstoppable FROZEN (Disney), which had the lowest Friday-to-Friday drop of the day (even better than Lego) to $1M and should find $5M more for the weekend, bringing its US total to $385M; and RIDE ALONG (Universal), with $1.3M on Friday and a likely $4M+ weekend, which will bring it over $120M in the US.
Apart from Frozen, the Oscar contenders continue to be led by AMERICAN HUSTLE (Sony) with $460K on Friday.
LIMITED RELEASE: The Oscar-nominated Japanese animation THE WIND RISES (Disney) had an OK start and might make it to a $15K average at 21 theatres for the weekend. IN SECRET (Roadside) got mostly brutal reviews and perished at 266 theatres with a weekend average that may not even reach $1000.
NEXT WEEKEND: Liam Neeson himself has next week’s “Liam Neeson movie” with NON-STOP (Universal), but the weekend’s wild card will be SON OF GOD (20th), which is largely a re-edited compilation of footage from the hit TV miniseries The Bible, with some new material added (and the Obama-lookalike Devil excised), and which may benefit from the kind of bulk ticketbuying from churches and other groups that have given recent religious dramas enormous opening weekends.
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