Weekend Forecast for November 22-24, 2013
By Reagen Sulewski
November 22, 2013
The other film opening wide this weekend, otherwise known as the film people buy tickets to in order to sneak into sold out showings, is Delivery Man, starring Vince Vaughn. A remake of a French-Canadian film and by the same director, it has Vaughn as an over grown manchild in the Sandlerian sense who receives a notice that he's being sued by 142 of his artificially inseminated children – a small group of over 500 who exist – to find out his identity (I wonder how many were inadvertently dating). This inspires a bit of awakening and panic, and Vaughn's character decides the only real choice of action is to surreptitiously follow around some of his children to see if he'd like the idea of being a dad. I mean, he still is anyway, but actively one. It's hard to see where this could go wrong, really.
We're a long ways away from the Vince Vaughn of Wedding Crashers and Old School, who was a dynamite draw and a comedic talent to be reckoned with. His last three films have been somewhat dreary affairs, each earning under $50 million total domestically. Delivery Man seems to fall into this same category, with poor reviews and lackluster commercials, the highlight of which seems to be Chris Pratt being smacked in the face. The wildcard here is the family angle, which can sometimes take unassuming films to higher levels. More likely, though, is that this angle will actively turn off fans of his edgier frat comedy. There's no Big Daddy about to happen here. I'd look for about $13 million for an opening weekend.
Thor kept the top spot at the box office, but by a much narrower margin than expected, with $36 million to The Best Man Holiday's $30 million. While these big drops are to be expected for super hero films, they're never too welcome, and it's definitely not the leading draw this weekend. It'll fall to about $17 million this weekend.
Meanwhile, The Best Man Holiday surprised essentially everyone in Hollywood with its opening, tapping into an audience that was obviously underserved, and/or looking for non Tyler Perry movies to see. With this kind of result, you can expect studios to look back at their titles to see what other long neglected franchises they might have. Can Soul Food 2 be far off? This should still fall pretty steeply this weekend, though, to around $15 million.
Sitting below these films are a few of hangers-on: Last Vegas, Free Birds and Bad Grandpa, which should all earn in the $5-6 million range this weekend. The live action films in that list are mild to large hits relative to budget, while the animated one of the bunch is a pretty significant failure. Such is the way of Hollywood these days.
|
Forecast: Weekend of November 22-24, 2013
|
Rank |
Film |
Number of
Sites |
Changes in Sites
from Last |
Estimated
Gross ($) |
|
1
|
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
|
4,163
|
New
|
180.3
|
|
2
|
Thor: The Dark World
|
3,713
|
-128
|
17.5
|
|
3
|
The Best Man Holiday
|
2,041
|
+17
|
15.0
|
|
4
|
Delivery Man
|
3,036
|
New
|
13.3
|
|
5
|
Last Vegas
|
3,237
|
0
|
5.9
|
|
6
|
Free Birds
|
3,071
|
-439
|
5.5
|
|
7
|
Bad Grandpa
|
2,625
|
-565
|
5.0
|
|
8
|
Gravity
|
1,845
|
-715
|
4.0
|
|
9
|
12 Years a Slave
|
1,474
|
+63
|
3.8
|
|
10
|
Ender's Game
|
2,035
|
-1,021
|
3.1
|
Continued:
1
2
|
|
|
|
Print this column
