For at least one more Friday, American Sniper is the undisputed champion of the
American Sniper may or may not best that number this weekend, but it will surely end up among the top Super Bowl weekends ahead of the current #3 weekend, the $24m debut for 20th Century Fox's Taken back in 2009. The $60 million war drama from Warner and Village Roadshow has earned $227.107m domestic and should end the frame with around $249m. It's already ahead of Saving Private Ryan ($216m back in 1998) so now it's a question of how far it can climb on the list in terms of inflation. Oh, and by weekend's end, it will have passed Transformers: Age of Extinction ($245m) to become the sixth-biggest domestic grosser of 2015. It will soon pass The LEGO Movie ($257m) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($259m) to become the third-biggest 2014 release behind Guardians of the Galaxy ($332m) and Hunger Games: Mockingjay part I ($334m). By the way, it should be noted that the film has been playing even better in various PLF screens than it has been in IMAX. It has earned 10.5% of its money as of Thursday ($22.3m) versus IMAX's 9.2% gross ($19.6m). As IMAX ended up dropping some of the screens this weekend and will drop all for the double-whammy of Jupiter Ascending and Seventh Son, it'll be interesting to follow along.
In terms of new release news, Paramount/Viacom Inc.'s Project Almanac was the top newbie on Friday and presumably the weekend. The Platinum Dunes production, a found footage-style time travel romp that cost $12 million to produce, earned $3.2 million on its first day of release. The (all due respect) surprisingly lousy "teens build a time machine" movie (to quote William Hurt, "How you do f*** that up?") should end the weekend with around $8m, which is low but remember that moviegoing plummets, especially for new genre-specific movies, on Super Bowl Sunday. Anyway, this was a cheap bit of offseason business on a weekend where you see a lot cheap horror/sci-fi thriller type films, but the number is still a letdown considering the aggressive marketing and social media outreach. If it has legs you'll hear about it here. The next new release was the Kevin Costner/Octavia Spencer drama Black and White. Released by Relativity, the race-relations film earned $2.27 million on its first day which should lead to a weekend of around $6m. Kevin Costner has the Disney "let's build a cross-country team" drama McFarland USA out next month, but at some point the relative lack of interest that audiences have shown in Kevin Costner vehicles is going to theoretically stop Costner from getting lead roles in studio releases, right?
The last wide new release is the relative dump that is The Loft. Released by Open Road Films, the James Marsden/Karl Urban/Wentworth Miller "guys find a dead lady in their secret apartment" thriller earned $1.18 million for the initial Friday to set the stage for a $2.5m weekend. The film was originally a Universal release and has a budget of $14m. In the name of mercy, I shall move on. Also technically "debuting" this weekend was the IMAX-only exhibition of the last two season four episodes of Game of Thrones. The two-part season finale, which ended with an "exclusive" sneak peak at season five, played on 205 IMAX screens and earned a not-too-shabby $686,000 on the first day. That sets the stage for a $1.75m weekend and a $8,500 per-screen-average. I took a sneak peak at the "film" before my Project Almanac showing started and while it basically looked like a remastered television show blown up to IMAX-size, the two people in the (early afternoon) audience seemed to be enjoying themselves. Once again, you'd be shocked at how much money I'd pay to see the season finales for The Flash and Arrow maybe 24 hours early in IMAX with a Batman V Superman promo attached if such a thing were offered, hint-hint, wink-wink.
Expanding to 303 theaters, the Jude Law submarine thriller Black Sea earned around $144,000 on its first wide Friday setting the stage for a $386k weekend and $438k total. That's obviously not a good result, so all I'll say is that I've heard good things and am planning on checking it out on Monday. In pure holdover news, Paddington earned another $1.94 million (-27% from last Friday) to bring its cume to $44m. The Jennifer Lopez thriller The Boy Next Door earned $2.1m on its second Friday (-63%) setting the stage for a $5.8m second weekend and 24m cume for the $4m Universal/Comcast Corp. release. Kevin Hart's The Wedding Ringer earned around $1.9m on its third Friday for Sony to set the stage for a $5.6m weekend (-50%) and $48m total, or about double its $23m budget. The Imitation Game earned $1.61m (-15%) to bring its cume to $64.14m. 20th Century Fox's Taken 3 earned another $2m on Friday and should end the weekend just over $81m. Oddly enough, Strange Magic (Disney's animated offering from LucasFilm) held strong with an estimated $1.3m Friday (-35%) for a likely $3.5m weekend and $10m total. It's still a flop, but it's a leggy one.
Not so leggy was Lions Gate Entertainment's Mortdecai, which plunged 67% on its second Friday for around $495k. The Johnny Depp comedy should earn $1.5m for the weekend and bring its total up to a non-robust $6.9m. Selma should earn around $2.7m for the weekend (-50%) and bring its total to $43m, but this weekend means that a $50m may be a ceiling. The Theory of Everything should earn around $1m this weekend to cross $30m total, while Whiplash should earn around $620k (-21%) to bring its cume to $8.5m and Boyhood will cross $25m either by Sunday or soon after. In non-Oscar news, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies earned $355k for a $250.7m domestic cume. Of course it opened with $49m in China last weekend, so I imagine the domestic gross is merely trivia at this point.
That's it for today. Join me tomorrow for weekend estimates and more holdover news and presumably a look at how well Kingsman: The Secret Service did in its UK debut.
