Despicable Me 2 is clearly a huge favorite here, the original won a July weekend by a healthy $25 million, and that was before anyone knew what a minion even was. This time they’ll be cashing in on name recognition, and if you add the first two weekends together for the first effort you get a number around $88 million. Yep, I believe the process will be accelerated enough to condense those two weekends, plus a little more for $91.9 million though it also helps that Steve Carell and his pals are facing a tomato can as competition.
Speaking of, The Lone Ranger! The film opened extremely softly on Tuesday evening, as in $2 million soft, which then translated to an estimated $10 million on Wednesday. By comparison, Despicable Me 2 put up nearly $5 million on Tuesday and $35 million on Wednesday, which is a largish number given the family dollar doesn’t start rolling in until the weekends. With an unknown product like Lone Ranger, you can expect ticket buyers to consult the reviews, which have been scathing. As well they should be, the film is horrible.
I’m placing it in the John Carter (which I actually enjoyed) and Battleship strata, as they were two films without much inherited audience confidence. Sure, The Lone Ranger was a television show, but from 1949-1957, not exactly current stuff. This one mostly screams “doomed vanity project” so I’m placing it slightly below $46 million. Just to up the degree of difficulty, tracking has yet to be released on either new title, though I saw Disney trying to lowball Lone Ranger at around $65 million for the five-day holiday weekend. Perhaps something to look into before you throw your entry in, but remember, we are predicting the three-day weekend, from July 5-7, 2013.
Monsters University is the biggest sad panda of the weekend, for Despicable Me 2 is aiming a missile right at the same demographic. Brave saw a nice improvement in the dip from the second weekend, but Monsters University won’t be as fortunate, likely looking at a 43 percent drop to come in at $24.2 million.
Finally, we come to The Heat. Smartly positioned, they have no adversaries for the R-Rated comedy dollar, so that 48 percent dip is actually a sign of respect. Most movies are entirely front-loaded these days, so a nice second-weekend number, paired with the low budget, means good things for the McCarthy / Bullock combination. I’m putting it at $20.4 million, but anything reasonable above call that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Current Record: 4-4 against the wisdom of crowds. Comeback!
Major Theater Chain (MTC) Tracking
The Lone Ranger: N/A
Despicable Me 2: N/A
SIDE NOTE: Some of the theater numbers below are estimates. We’ll have the actual counts in Sunday’s wrap-up article.
SIDE NOTE #2: We are working on creating a second leaderboard for the RopeofSilicon Box Office Challenge that will track overall prediction accuracy, so don’t think just because you aren’t scoring big in the points department that your predictions are being overlooked. Get those predictions in and after the fifth week we’ll begin taking a look at how accurate your predictions are!
