As holidays go, the 4th of July isn’t a bright one for moviegoing, and when it falls on a Friday, the result is a weekend no better than usual (the days before and after compensate for the holiday itself). That held true this year as well, especially because the other studios showed more deference to Transformers in its 2d weekend than they probably needed to.
TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (Paramount) will be the easy weekend winner, with preliminary numbers at Deadline and elsewhere giving it $11M on Friday. That’s up about 15% from Thursday, but down a crushing 74% from its opening day last Friday. By way of comparison, that’s slightly better than Godzilla‘s 2d Friday (-77%), about equal with X-Men: Days of Future Past, but less strong than Captain America: The Winter Soldier (-68%) or The Amazing Spider-Man (-72%). Transformers should be at around $178M after a $38M 3-day weekend, and should take the summer crown, but figures to be neck-and-neck with Captain America and The LEGO Movie for the top movie of 2014 at around $257M when all is said and done.
TAMMY (Warners) was at the top of the newcomers, but not very impressively. Its Friday was $6.3M, up about 18% from Thursday and headed for a $21M weekend. It’s still on target for perhaps $75M in all, not a bad result for a relatively low-budget project, but not a bonanza, either.
After that, it’s anyone’s guess at this point how DELIVER US FROM EVIL (Screen Gems/Sony), EARTH TO ECHO (Relativity), 21 JUMP STREET (Columbia/Sony) and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 (DreamWorks Animation/20th) will rank, since all are estimating Fridays of around $2.5-3M (just about equal to their Thursdays, give or take) and should have $10-11M weekends. (Echo and Dragon may have a slight edge with the weekend matinee crowds, but not enough to put them far above the others.) Dragon is down about 40% Friday-to-Friday, while 22 Jump is down about 50%.
Similarly, MALEFICENT (Disney) and JERSEY BOYS (Warners) are both at $1.8-1.9M on Friday and heading for $6-7M weekends, with Maleficent down about 30% Friday-to-Friday and Jersey down about 25%. THINK LIKE A MAN TOO (Screen Gems/Sony) is behind with a $1.4M Friday (down 60% from last Friday) and a $5M weekend on the way.
In limited release, BEGIN AGAIN (Weinstein) is on track for an OK $8K weekend average at 175 theatres, while SNOWPIERCER (Weinstein/Radius), which will be available on VOD next week, will have a slower $4500 average at 250.
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