'Battle: Los Angeles' Leads Friday Box-Office While 'Mars Needs Moms' Bombs

The film at the top isn’t much of a surprise and neither is the amount it brought it as the estimated $13.5 million Columbia’s Battle: Los Angeles brought in on Friday could mean $37 million to upwards of $40 million for the weekend should word of mouth prevail. The reported budget on the film is $70 million so overall it should be a win for the studio.

I now wonder if they should have been a little more ambiguous with the destruction going on around the rest of the world in the film, as I got the impression the rest of the world had pretty much been squashed and L.A. was the final stand. The studio has to wonder about sequel potential as this could have led to scenarios such as Battle: Tokyo and Battle: Paris. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if they go for that anyway.

In second is the soft performance of Warner’s Red Riding Hood, which Laremy predicted would take just under $20 million for the weekend. Instead, the $5.7 million on Friday will likely only earn the pic around $17 million. I guess that should be a lesson, you can’t make a film that simply looks like a Twilight knock-off and bring in the Twilight fans. The same goes for trying to attract that Harry Potter audience with cheaper, less impressive clones. Dedicated fans are more savvy and discerning than studios take them to be.

The reported budget on Red Riding Hood is only $42 million so it isn’t an all out disaster, but it’s certainly not Twilight numbers.

Currently in third is Rango with $5.5 million, but it should bump up to the second slot after Saturday and Sunday. I’m actually surprised to see it doing so well. I assumed word of mouth on this one would kill it from one weekend to the next as I see it more as a film lover’s movie rather than a film for mass consumption. That $5.5m could turn into upwards of $23 million for the weekend, which would signal about a 40% drop from last weekend. It would be interesting to see the demographics on this one. Are families still checking this out or is it attracting the adults that really are the audience it was made for?

The Adjustment Bureau lands in fourth with $3.4 million and a likely $12 million weekend and in fifth is the big story of the weekend.

Disney’s Mars Needs Moms cost the studio $150 million to make and managed $1.7 million on Friday, which should translate to about $7-8 million for the weekend. I found Nikki Finke’s description of this film’s performance and the impact it had at Disney before ever being released quite interesting. Here’s what she had to say:

But the movie that all of Hollywood was talking about Friday is Disney’s lamely titled Mars Needs Moms 3D. Why? Because the Dick Cook leftover is going to be one of the biggest money losers of all time. It cost $150M but, even with the higher 3D ticket prices, it’ll be lucky to pull in $10M this weekend — that’s right all weekend. “It’s about as bad of an animated miss as possible,” one rival studio exec emailed me. It’s rare that any Disney toon flops at all, much less this badly. Even though it’s based on the book by author and illustrator Berkeley Breathed, the Pulitzer Prize winner for his comic strip â€œBloom Countyâ€. But my insiders say this movie is why, after Rich Ross screened it, Disney a year ago shuttered Robert Zemeckis’ Imagemovers Digital which also produced the blockbuster Disney’s A Christmas Carol. (Of course, Cook’s slate also included that as well as last year’s huge moneymakers Alice In Wonderland and Toy Story 3).

Yikes.

I’ve detailed the rest of the Friday box-office below and will be back on Sunday morning with a complete wrap-up.