Your Complete Weekend Box Office Tracking, Predictions, & Analysis (05.07.15)

	THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON	$95 million
	HOT PURSUIT	$18 million
	FURIOUS 7	$4 million
	THE AGE OF ADALINE	$3 million
	PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2	$2.5 million

It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives near a screen of any kind that Age of Ultron will take the weekend again. And not just by a little; possibly by a factor of 5. In general, movies that score big also drop big; see, for instance, Furious 7, which lost 60 percent of its audience between its first and second weekends, falling from $147 million to $59 million, or the first Avengers, which dropped from $207 million to $103 million. In all likelihood, Age of Ultron will drop somewhere between 50 and 60 percent. The number I have above reflects a 50 percent drop, but a 60 percent drop would put it in the mid-70s — which is still more than three times what the second-place finisher is likely to make.

That second place will go to the weekend’s sole new release, Hot Pursuit, an action comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara. Reviews are not good, but Hot Pursuit is tracking pretty well, and provides moderately decent counter-programming for Age of Ultron. And the only comedy theaters have seen for a while now is Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. It’s not going to set records, but Hot Pursuit probably won’t embarrass itself, either.

	Opening Weekend	Current Gross	Facebook Likes	Tweets
THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON	$191.271 million	$217.632 million	13,858,672	591,014
HOT PURSUIT	N/A	N/A	140,896	28,832
FURIOUS 7	$147.187 million	$332.173 million	56,828,677	56,052
THE AGE OF ADALINE	$13.203 million	$24.716 million	350,355	–
PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2	$23.762 million	$52.255 million	1,128,844	–

After Hot Pursuit, the drop-off becomes even steeper. Furious 7, The Age of Adaline, and Mall Cop are all going into their third week or older. The most any of them made last week was Furious 7‘s $6.6 million, so they don’t have very far to fall. When grosses get that low, everything’s pretty squished together, so their ordering is hard to predict, but it seems a relatively safe bet that Furious 7 will hang on to third, leaving Adaline and Mall Cop to duke it out for the bottom spot.

	Rotten Tomatoes			IMDb		Metacritic
	Critics	Users	# of Ratings	Stars	# of Ratings
THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON	75	89	230,326	8.1	136,533	66
HOT PURSUIT	10	N/A	9,194	4.3	115	30
FURIOUS 7	82	87	169,745	7.8	133,984	67
THE AGE OF ADALINE	54	71	22,540	7.4	5,603	51
PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2	6	46	25,533	4.0	4,025	13

(Sources: boxoffice.com, rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com, metacritic.com. Starred figures are estimates. Tweets represent figures for this week only. Figures represent numbers at time of writing, and may have changed. Tracking Board does not report Rotten Tomatoes user ratings for movies that have not yet seen wide release.)

Madelyn Glymour | Contributor