EARLY WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: “Maleficent” Loses A Bit of Magic, “A Million Ways” Still Dead

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Based on preliminary numbers at Deadline and elsewhere, MALEFICENT (Disney) gained just 6% on Saturday from its Friday start, not a great bump for a family movie, giving it around $25.5M on Saturday and a weekend that now looks like it won’t quite reach $70M, more like $67M.  It’s behaving like Alice In Wonderland (up 8% on its 2d day of release) rather than Oz: The Great and Powerful (up 37%), probably reflecting that as with Johnny Depp and Alice, the Angelina Jolie audience for Maleficent is skewing older than the usual family matinee crowd.  It’s still in line for a US total around $200M, unless its reign is cut short by other summer arrivals (both Alice and Oz opened in spring, when there’s less intense competition).  Maleficent also opened in more than half the world’s overseas markets this week, and we’ll see what those numbers look like tomorrow.

There was no relief for A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (Universal), which was essentially flat with Friday, reporting a 2% increase that barely registers on its $6.1M start.  It might not even hit $17M for the weekend, a genuinely fatal result.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (20th) is reporting a $15M Saturday, up more than 60% from Friday and down a very reasonable 52% from its first Saturday.  That should mean a $34-35M weekend, down a still-heavy but less painful 62% from its first 3 days, and perhaps $225-230M as its US total.