Avengers: Age of Ultron will win this weekend by a whole lot, and really finding three other movies interesting enough to even predict is a chore. But back to The Avengers, it didn’t open in the record fashion I predicted, clearly weighed down by playoffs, the draft, the fight, schools still not quite out, or the running time. Whatever the case, it’s still earned nearly $700 million worldwide, so they are going to be just fine. Opening internationally first is starting to make more sense if you believe piracy hurts box office overseas. Domestically, this one is $40 million down against the original after five days so far, and even though it will add $82.3 million this weekend, it will still fall even further behind as the last one put up triple digits in its sophomore weekend.
Hot Pursuit looks to be a disaster. $10.8 million is my number, but you could easily go $7 million … or $15 million. As of this writing it’s at a very unhealthy 16 percent on RottenTomatoes and Brad gave it an “F”. So that’s not ideal. Even the trailers look awful. That said, maybe they’ll trick some date nights into seeing it. Or girl’s night out? Either way, it’s going to sink like a stone soon afterward and never be heard from again.
The Age of Adaline is where things get to be super smallball, we’re talking about less than 500,000 tickets here. You could affect the box office with a few friends. I’ve put this down at $3.4 million and there’s really not too much to say other than to note they could hit $30 million this weekend. Though without a production budget, it’s hard to know what that means.
The D Train seems like it would be a good idea on paper. I like Jack Black. But no, he doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to picking projects, and this one looks DOA too. With very limited theaters it won’t make much of an impact, $2.1 million is my number.
That’s all I’ve got, your turn to predict!
SIDE NOTE: Some of the theater numbers below are estimates. We’ll have the actual counts in Sunday’s wrap-up article.</em
