Once again the surprises are limited at the weekend box office as Universal’s Despicable Me 2 took the top spot for a second weekend in a row, dropping 46% for an estimated $44.7 million weekend bringing its domestic total to $229 million. Question now is how will it fair against Wednesday’s new opener Turbo, which I saw this weekend and can tell you it’s an animated film to contend with. It hits a lot of demos and it’s pretty good to boot.
Outside of Despicable‘s performance, however, all the focus was on the newcomers as Adam Sandler and gang took second place with Grown Ups 2 bringing in an estimated $42.5 million, the second best opening of Sandler’s career (The Longest Yard; $47.6m) and $2 million more than the 2010 original. The film earned a “B” CinemaScore from opening day audiences, which doesn’t necessarily mean much in this case as I expect it will end up close to the original’s $162 million domestic cume.
It was predicted long before the weekend even began that Guillermo del Toro‘s big budget robots vs. monsters movie, Pacific Rim, would fall to the Grown Ups sequel and that just so happened to be the case. Pacific Rim opened with $38.3 million and an “A-” CinemaScore, which tells me it’s not likely to break out domestically and be massive, but I expect the overseas prospects ($53 million this weekend) on this one to be quite large and given the $190 million budget, it’s gonna need it. I wouldn’t get too excited about the rumored sequel though.
In other news, The Weinstein’s limited release of the excellent Fruitvale Station was huge as the directorial debut of Ryan Coogler opened in only seven theaters and brought in a whopping $377,000 ($53,857 per). Future looks bright for that one and deservedly so, here’s my review.
Holding over from a limited release last week and this weekend expanding into 79 theaters, The Way, Way Back (another great movie you should seek out instead of the bloated blockbusters) managed $1.1 million this weekend. Be on the lookout, it’s going to expand further.
Next weekend sees the release of Turbo beginning on Wednesday and an epic mix of limited and wide releases on Friday including Girl Most Likely, Only God Forgives, R.I.P.D., Red 2 and The Conjuring. As far as I can tell it’s Turbo‘s for the taking, or do you see either Red 2 or The Conjuring having much of a chance?
Moving to reader predictions compared to Laremy’s predictions, I forgot to post the averages on Friday and so I’m bringing them to you now, which I think I will begin doing every Sunday as well as Friday. More information doesn’t hurt right?
122 of you posted predictions this week and the current top five for the four movies in competition are below the top ten estimates, but directly below are the reader averages compared to Laremy’s predictions. As it stands, the readers out-predicted Laremy 4-for-4, will that victory hold once actuals roll in?
Laremy’s Predictions
- Despicable Me 2 – $44.2 million
- Grown Ups 2 – $35.3 million
- Pacific Rim – $29.3 million
- The Lone Ranger – $13.7 million
Your Predictions
- Despicable Me 2 – $44.5 million
- Pacific Rim – $35.89 million
- Grown Ups 2 – $35.4 million
- The Lone Ranger – $12.98 million
The weekend top ten follows along with the reader prediction results, which won’t be final until Monday afternoon once actuals are in. And in just a couple weeks I’ll be revealing the second leaderboard, which will be tracking your overall prediction accuracy so keep those predictions coming in every Thursday.
