The odds are strong that on Sunday morning, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (Paramount) will claim a $100M weekend, the first of 2014–but we won’t really know until Monday whether the movie has hit that mark. According to reports at Deadline and elsewhere, Transformers 4 fell sharply on Saturday from its $41.6M opening day, in the area of 20-25%. That’s not Fault In Our Stars-level front-loading (-51% on its 2d day of release), but it’s a steeper drop than those for X-Men: Days of Future Past (-18%), Godzilla (-16%), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 or Captain America: The Winter Soldier (both -6%), and it gives Transformers 4 $31-33M on Saturday, for a 2-day total of $72.6-74.6M. The Sunday drop could be anywhere in the 20-30% range, which would leave the blockbuster with a weekend at $94M on the low end (which wouldn’t even be the #1 opening of the year, behind the $95M for Captain America) and $101M in the best-case scenario. As noted, expect Paramount to claim the latter tomorrow, but only final numbers will tell the tale. (FYI, comparisons with earlier Transformers don’t work, because they all had mid-week openings, so the Day1-to-Day 2 dynamic was different.)
The weekend’s holdovers all had 20-25% Saturday bumps from their Friday results. That should give 22 JUMP STREET (Columbia/Sony) a $15M weekend, good enough for 2d place, and put HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 (DreamWorks Animation/20th) at $13M, and THINK LIKE A MAN TOO (Screen Gems/Sony) at $10M, with MALEFICENT (Disney) at $8.5M and JERSEY BOYS (Warners) at $7.5M. Maleficent joined Captain America, X-Men, The LEGO Movie and (just barely) Spider-Man in the $200M+ club for the year.
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