Friday Box-Office: 'Tower Heist' Takes Friday, but 'Puss in Boots' Will Take the Weekend

Friday Box-Office: ‘Tower Heist’ Takes Friday, but ‘Puss in Boots’ Will Take the Weekend

November 5, 2011

By Brad Brevet

It’s going to be a tight race at the top of the box-office this weekend, but it would appear we’ll have a repeat at #1 as Dreamworks Animation’s Puss in Boots should leap frog Friday topper Tower Heist for the three day.

Last weekend Puss in Boots opened to a relatively soft $34 million for an animated 3D feature, but after $7.7 million on Friday it should be able to come up with a $28 million weekend for a 21% drop and a cumulative total around $78 million. Not too bad, but it’s going to need plenty more weekends like that to really make up the ground it has already lost, domestically that is.

Puss in Boots will begin rolling out internationally on November 17 when it opens in Hong Kong. If the Shrek franchise is any kind of foreign barometer, the fourth installment brought in $513 million overseas last year, which was the highest foreign take for any of the four Shrek films, which is definitely a good sign for Puss’ upcoming foreign debut.

As for Tower Heist, it opened with $8.1 million and will likely end around $24-25 million for the weekend. There is a small chance it could overperform on Saturday and Sunday and remain #1, but that’s one bet I would never take. Universal spent a reported $85 million on the pic, so it had better hope those international dollars are able to boost a disappointing start.

In third is Warner’s A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. Budgeted at $20 million, the film brought in $5.4 million on Friday and should end the weekend around $14-15 million.

Rounding out the top five are previously released Paranormal Activity 3 and In Time, the latter of which opened just last week to a meager $12 million.

I’ve included the Friday top ten directly below and will be back tomorrow morning with the complete wrap-up.