Current Streak: 1 Straight Weekend #1 Predicted Correctly
Threat Level to Streak Being Broken: Low
Reason: Taken 2 should have very little difficulty taking the throne from a holdover (Hotel Transylvania) and a stop-motion animation that serve the same demo. Regardless of how terrible Taken 2 is, it’s looking pretty set up for the weekend.
Taken 2 is as close to a sure thing as we’ve seen in a few weekends. I like a number around $11,500 per theater for $36.5 million this weekend.
The original only opened at $7,700 per theater in 2009, so where am I getting the extra cash from? From the next two weekends, where Taken fell off only seventeen and eight percent. Added together, the first three weekends of Taken brought in $20,000 per theater, people were digging it, which will help Taken 2 in a big way this weekend. It won’t be until next weekend that people start noting how preposterous the film actually is.
In the silver medal slot, I like Hotel Transylvania to hold over relatively well (45 percent dip).
Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie will manage nearly $19 million, good for fourth place, and if Adam Sandler and Tim Burton would have just combined to form one mega-power animation they’d have had the top slot.
Pitch Perfect is getting an additional 2,300 theaters, but it was slightly frontloaded in limited form last weekend. I see it coming in third with somewhere around $18.7 million.
Looper is looking as though it will need a total nearing $75 million to profit, it sits at $34 million worldwide, and something in the triple digits feels likely if it manages anything at all internationally. The Master keeps on creeping and peeping, hitting $10 million on Tuesday and looking to add another $2.6 million this weekend.
Lastly, we’ll be closing the book on Finding Nemo 3-D this weekend, we all got together and threw around $40 million extra dollars toward Pixar for that little effort.
How say you? There are two new releases to consider, and Pitch Perfect is getting an expansion, so predictions away!
SIDE NOTE: Some of the theater numbers below are estimates. We’ll have the actual counts in Sunday’s wrap-up article.
