Current Streak: 11 Straight Weekends #1 Predicted Correctly
Threat Level to Streak: Medium
Reason: Audiences taking a pass on the weekend as a whole, causing a few hundred thousand tickets in either direction to sway the weekend.
If you thought last weekend was bad, just wait until you get a hold of this bad boy. I’ve got the top twelve making a rollicking $70m at the box office, which would be, you guessed it, the worst result of the year. Even worse than last weekend? How is that possible? I’ll tell you how, let’s break it down!
In the top spot, the odds are solid that The Possession will take the crown with what I’m predicting to be $12.2 million. Last weekend, The Apparition scared up $3,508 per theater, it just didn’t have enough theaters. With an estimated 2,700 theaters, The Possession won’t have that problem. It’s only facing one other wide release of merit, Lawless, which it should vanquish with relative ease. By which I mean less than half a million ticket buyers.
The main problem with Lawless isn’t the talent involved, which is prodigious, it’s the western genre as a whole. They have a tough time pulling weekend wins out of their cap. Evidently the film is tracking very well with young males, which makes sense given the level of violence, but I can’t see it earning more than a meager $3,500 per theater, to finish just shy of $9 million for the three-day weekend.
Heading down the board we find a mess of sad stories. The Expendables 2 will fall 45 percent to around $7.3 million, and that $100 million production budget now seems like a bad investment. The film stands at $121 million worldwide, but it should fade fast as Fall beckons.
ParaNorman and 2016: Obama’s America should face friendlier declines, in the 25 to 30 percent range, and it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, the Republican National Convention has upon that film.
The Bourne Legacy is still around $200 million short of a profit right now, and this weekend’s $5 million haul won’t do much to help. That’s the story of the box office as we hit September, we’re in that middle ground where the summer has petered out … but the Oscar-bait has yet to appear.
How say you?
You can call The Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure in your personal top ten, though it didn’t make mine. You could call for the upset, with Lawless skating past The Possession, though I wouldn’t recommend it. Regardless, predictions away!
SIDE NOTE: Some of the theater numbers below are estimates. We’ll have the actual counts in Sunday’s wrap-up article. All predictions are for the three-day, not the four-day, weekend.
