Friday Box Office Analysis
By Reagen Sulewski
May 9, 2015
Afterglow weekend at the box office gives us no surprises, and the extremely weak challengers did nothing to even moderately threaten The Avengers: Age of Ultron from handily winning its second weekend.
Looking beyond just that first place finish on Friday, with an estimated $21.3 million, we see some potential weakness in the film, which opened to nearly $200 million last weekend. This figure is off a mighty 75% from last Friday, though of course that number is hugely inflated by the huge number of Thursday night previews. It's also off 25% from The Avengers' second Friday back in 2012, and implies a second weekend figure of about $78 million for Ultron. That should get it to about $310-315 million by the end of the weekend, making it the second fastest film to reach $300 million – tied with The Dark Knight. That's a film that earned $533 million domestic, and is looking like a solid target for Ultron to aim for – although perhaps $500 is more realistic given the larger drop we're seeing out of the gate here.
The biggest new challenger this weekend was Hot Pursuit, which opened to $4.2 million at around 3,000 venues. This compares quite unfavorably to its comparable film, The Heat, which started with over $13 million, or even another Reese action comedy, This Means War, which started with $5.6 million three years ago. We should be looking at a weekend of around $12 million based on these numbers.
The other new wide opener, The D Train, finished well outside of the top 10 with a miserable $160,000 (you read that right) at around 1,000 venues – giving us a projection of about $400,000. An indie comedy with a inadequate marketing campaign and an ill-advised release strategy, this result will place it at the very least in the worst 20 opening weekends of all time for a wide release and with an off chance at the worst 10. If you have any notion of seeing this film in theaters for some reason – do it now.
Returning films are not making much of an impact, as they play out their strings. The Age of Adeline leads the way with $1.5 million, with Furious 7 and Paul Blart 2: Why God Why showing respectable results with $1.4 and $1.2 million respectively. Look for all these films to finish in the $4-5 million range.
Ex Machina gets a slight uptick from $720,000 to $960,000 after an expansion to over 2,000 venues (a bulk of them due to its Canadian debut) and should get it to about $3.5 million this weekend and $15 million after Sunday. Rounding out the slate is Home with $610,000 and a bunch of sub-half million films – Unfriended, Cinderella, The Longest Ride and Woman in Gold.
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Projected Estimates for the Top Ten (Three-Day)
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Projected
Rank |
Film |
Estimated Gross |
|
1
|
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
|
78.5
|
|
2
|
Hot Pursuit
|
12.2
|
|
3
|
The Age of Adeline
|
4.8
|
|
4
|
Furious 7
|
4.6
|
|
5
|
Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
|
3.8
|
|
6
|
Ex Machina
|
3.5
|
|
7
|
Home
|
2.8
|
|
8
|
Cinderella
|
1.8
|
|
9
|
Unfriended
|
1.6
|
|
10
|
Woman in Gold
|
1.1
|
|
|
|
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