Weekend Forecast for April 1-3, 2016
By Reagen Sulewski
April 1, 2016
The film itself looks like a noisy mess that can't decide whether its real target is race relations or horror films, and appears pretty sloppily made, with a very random approach to storytelling. This screams “limited appeal” and vastly overstates both the popularity of its star and of the movie it's parodying. I'd expect just $3 million this weekend.
This brings us to last weekend's giant box office champ, Batman v Superman, which started off with $170 m... wait, $166 million, breaking the March record and coming in at sixth all time for opening weekends. This despite the lackluster reception of Man of Steel and recasting its Batman. What drove audiences here, contrary to the terrible reviews of the film, is a simple curiosity about taking two of DC's biggest heroes and pitting them into an epic battle. It's no secret that Warner Bros, owners of the rights to the DC properties, has looked on at Marvel's Cinematic Universe with green-tinged envy as Marvel and has managed to take its roster of heroes and churn them into movie after movie of world-shattering hits (Ant-Man, people! Ant-Man!). At last then, after the bright spot of The Dark Knight, WB looks like it has something it can build off. Maybe. Hopefully.
There's those terrible reviews and mediocre at best word-of-mouth to worry about, but as a proof of concept it does at least show that people want to give these films a benefit of the doubt. It's all leading up to a Justice League movie that might, might compete with the Avengers films, but has some work to do. To start with, we're going to have a major drop-off for this second weekend, particularly if we are looking at the daily performances. Often that can be a bit of tea reading, but at the least we can say there are no good signs, as it's running behind – in raw dollars even – last year's comparable release of Furious 7. I look for a second weekend of $66 million.
Zootopia continues to roll along as the top family choice in theaters, with $300 million perhaps in its sights. The not-amazing, but competent and surprisingly deep family film earned $24 million in its fourth weekend, averaging out to about 32 percent drop per week – and with no competition, it should be able to keep this up this weekend with about $17 million.
Speaking of legs, we have the reasonable opening weekend of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, the sequel we apparently all asked for, at about $18 million, a figure the original didn't reach until its tenth week of release. There's nothing to take anyone by surprise this time, and the extremely sitcom-y nature of the film is front and center. Due to the average age of the film's audience, I still expect a little bit of a run, with a fall to about $11 million this weekend.
|
Forecast: Weekend of April 1-3, 2016
|
Rank |
Film |
Number of
Sites |
Changes in Sites
from Last |
Estimated
Gross ($) |
|
1
|
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
|
4,256
|
+14
|
66.4
|
|
2
|
Zootopia
|
3,698
|
+28
|
17.7
|
|
3
|
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
|
3,179
|
+46
|
11.0
|
|
4
|
God's Not Dead 2
|
2,300+
|
New
|
10.7
|
|
5
|
Miracles From Heaven
|
3,155
|
+108
|
4.8
|
|
6
|
Allegient
|
3,018
|
-722
|
4.0
|
|
7
|
10 Cloverfield Lane
|
2,511
|
-291
|
3.5
|
|
8
|
Deadpool
|
1,968
|
-368
|
3.0
|
|
9
|
Meet the Blacks
|
1,011
|
New
|
2.9
|
|
10
|
London Has Fallen
|
1,510
|
-663
|
1.9
|
Continued:
1
2
|
|
|
|
Print this column
