Weekend Forecast for June 13-15, 2014
By Reagen Sulewski
June 13, 2014
There's a light, easy chemistry between the leads, which carried a lot of the first film, and combining this with the perfect amount of irony and parody in the script makes this a potentially big winner at the box office. The first opened to a then boggling $36 million, and its legend has only grown since then. Getting raunchier without getting too crude, and aiming at a just slightly older audience is amazingly savvy in terms of script and business, and should lead to a breakout to around $50 million this weekend.
The Fault in Our Stars had one of the most unusual opening weekends in history, earning almost 55% of its weekend business on “Friday”, and almost a sixth of it in Thursday evening sneaks, thanks to a special $25-ticketed cast event. The teenage weepie struck a blow for emotionally-bent YA adaptations and won an easy victory on the weekend over the once largest box office star in the world, but seems headed for one of the briefest runs in cinema history of a hit, thanks to all that early anticipation. Now, at $12 million to make, there is no reasonable way to spin this as anything but a massive hit and a massive story. It just managed to front-load all of its business and make studios sit up and take notice. What was once likely seen as a throwaway film blew up into one of the biggest business stories of the year. That it'll drop to about $18 million this weekend is, again, almost immaterial.
The fractured fairy tale Maleficent dropped a little over 50% in its second weekend after a massive opening weekend near $70 million. That's simply the style of the times, and it's difficult to find fault with the $130 million it has earned so far. I'm looking for a final total of right around $200 million domestic and about $17 million this weekend.
Edge of Tomorrow was the disappointment last weekend in box office terms, if not quality, managing just $28 million, throwing under even the shiny, but mediocre Oblivion in the Tom Cruise canon. Solid word-of-mouth might help it, but the die is usually cast for sci-fi in its opening weekend. Even a $15 million second weekend seems a bit optimistic.
X-Men: Days of Future Past will cross the $200 million milestone this weekend, perhaps as early as Friday becoming, remarkably, just the third film in the franchise to do so and the first in eight years. It's been an interesting run for this franchise, never really creating a massive groundswell audience but never outright failing either. It should earn about $7 million this weekend.
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Forecast: Weekend of June 13-15, 2014
|
Rank |
Film |
Number of
Sites |
Changes in Sites
from Last |
Estimated
Gross ($) |
|
1
|
How To Train Your Dragon 2
|
4,253
|
New
|
78.8
|
|
2
|
22 Jump Street
|
3,306
|
New
|
50.4
|
|
3
|
The Fault in Our Stars
|
3,273
|
+100
|
17.8
|
|
4
|
Maleficent
|
3,623
|
-325
|
17.0
|
|
5
|
Edge of Tomorrow
|
3,505
|
+15
|
15.2
|
|
6
|
X-Men: Days of Future Past
|
3,042
|
-597
|
7.5
|
|
7
|
A Million Ways to Die in the West
|
2,406
|
-754
|
3.3
|
|
8
|
Godzilla
|
2,088
|
-1,022
|
3.0
|
|
9
|
Neighbors
|
1,886
|
-788
|
3.0
|
|
10
|
Chef
|
1,102
|
-196
|
2.0
|
Continued:
1
2
|
|
|
|
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