SHOWBUZZDAILY EARLY FRIDAY BOXOFFICE REPORT – 9/14/12

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This weekend’s boxoffice is looking stronger than last week’s–but that’s not saying very much.  According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION (Screen Gems/Sony) owned Friday with $8.8M.  That’s lower than the opening days for the last several Resident Evil installments ($10.7M/$9.6M/$9.2M for the last 3), and should mean a $22M opening weekend and around $50M in total.  The movie cost $65M, but this is one of those franchises that is overwhelmingly tilted toward international appeal (the last Resident Evil made 80% of its worldwide boxoffice overseas), so a shortfall of $10M or so in the US won’t mean too much.

FINDING NEMO 3D (Pixar/Disney) was a little lower than expected with $5.3M on Friday.  It’ll make up ground in weekend matinee business, but that should only get it to around $18M for the weekend, still considerably below the $30.2M opening for the 3D version of The Lion King last September, and in line instead with the softer $17.8M weekend that Beauty and the Beast 3D had in January.  This is all found money for Disney, of course, but a bit surprising considering the shortage of family movies in the market.

Everything else in the Top 10 is a holdover, headed again by THE POSSESSION (Lionsgate) with what will probably be a $6M weekend.  The good news for all these pictures is that with nothing new at the multiplex appealing to wide audiences, the weekly declines are relatively low, in the 30-40% neighborhood.

On the exclusive release front, THE MASTER (Weinstein Company) is only in 5 NY/LA theatres, but it’s on track for a massive per-theatre average, perhaps in the range of $100K.  The question for this difficult, brilliant art film is whether it will be able to expand effectively and overcome what’s almost certain to be very mixed word of mouth.