Turbo should win an extremely interesting game of box office roulette this weekend, holding off three other new releases and some strong holdovers.
The reason to like Turbo‘s chances? As always, it’s the intended audience, there are more families than there are horror fans, plus the adult action audience has seemingly been split in two this weekend.
Last weekend featured a film where monsters and aliens crashed together, while this weekend features studios clanging new release dates on each other’s heads, hoping they can still come out on top. As such, I’m going over tracking on Turbo, with $30.2 million, but there’s about a six million dollar swing either way especially with Despicable Me 2 still in the mix. With this much confusion in the marketplace, it’s going to take some clever predicting to get points on more than one title this time around.
In second place, make mine The Conjuring. When was the last time three of the top four films were non-sequels? Someone research that and get back to us! Regardless, you’ve got to like the horror genre in terms of pent-up demand, as it has been more than a month since The Purge opened at $34 million. Can this crack $30 million as well? Or is my $26.5 million call more appropriate? No matter the financial result, this should end up as the best-reviewed film of the weekend, unless R.I.P.D. is a surprise, last-minute good film (it’s not screening until Thursday evening).
Red 2 should get a slight sequel bump, but it’s facing a tough critical reception, plus it’s hard to find anyone who was clamoring for this sequel. Personally, I also think the marketing has been terrible, focusing mostly on “getting old is funny” style humor as opposed to just showing us the set-up for a cool story. I’ve still got it coming in above tracking at $24.7 million, but it is hard to project a true over-perform here.
Finally, the last of the new releases, R.I.P.D.. It really does for all the world look like Men in Black, only without the innovation quotient of the original Will Smith / Tommy Lee Jones film. Any one of these four films could break out, but it’s easier to bet against this one than the others, especially because word-of-mouth has the potential to be withering. My guess? It won’t be so much of a “bad” movie as it will be a “boring” one, which will only allow it to limp to $22.5 million.
How say you? It’s crowded and steamy at the box office weekend, the leaderboard is in full swing, so get in there!
Current Record: 5-10-1 against the wisdom of crowds. But man, the predictions were almost the exact same last weekend!
Major Theater Chain (MTC) Tracking
Turbo: $25 million
The Conjuring: $25 million
Red 2: $22 million
R.I.P.D.: $20.5 million
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 looking to introduce the second leaderboard for the RopeofSilicon Box Office Challenge that will track overall prediction accuracy next weekend, but you will have had to post predictions in at least five weekends to make it on the chart. So continue to get those predictions in and soon enough we’ll take a look at those accuracy numbers as well.
