Your Complete Weekend Box Office Tracking, Predictions, & Analysis (09.25.14)
0by: Madelyn Glymour | Contributor
TRACKING BOARD TOP 5 WEEKEND PREDICTIONS |
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Order | Title | Weekend Expectations |
# 1 | THE EQUALIZER | $31 million |
# 2 | THE MAZE RUNNER | $16 million |
# 3 | THE BOXTROLLS | $15 million |
# 4 | THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU | $7 million |
# 5 | A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES | $6 million |
This week’s movies are a little tricky to predict. It seems pretty likely that “The Equalizer” will take the weekend — for reasons I’ll get to in a minute — but the ordering of most of the rest of the top five is shaky, at best. Take, for instance, “This Is Where I Leave You” and “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” which I’ve got in the #4 and #5 spots respectively. Last weekend, “Tombstones” took in about a million and a half more than “This Is Where I Leave You.” The former got better reviews than the latter (though neither exactly had the critics glowing), and the audience pool for a Liam Neeson action thriller is probably bigger than for a dramedy about grieving — note, for instance the low number of people who have rated it on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. But a lot of the “Tombstones” audience will undoubtedly abandon it for “The Equalizer” this week, and since “This Is Where I Leave You” has no competition its genre at the moment, I expect that it won’t see as much of a drop as “Tombstones” will. Nevertheless, I predict the two films will see very similar takes this weekend, and it’s not too unlikely that their spots could be switched.
There’s also a dark horse, “No Good Deed,” which made $10.2 million last week, dropping about 60 percent from its opening weekend. If either “This Is Where I Leave You” or “Tombstones” sees a similar drop, “No Good Deed” could knock them out of the top five. But I doubt that “No Good Deed” will break $5 million this weekend, and either of its competitors for the #5 spot would have to see their ticket sales absolutely gutted to go that low.
Opening Weekend | Current Gross | Facebook Likes | Tweets | |
THE EQUALIZER | N/A | N/A | 279,168 | 6,530 |
THE MAZE RUNNER | $32.5 million | $36.8 million | 1,073,157 | 148,169 |
THE BOXTROLLS | N/A | N/A | 219,493 | 27,135 |
THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU | $11.5 million | $13.6 million | 212,377 | 16,858 |
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES | $12.7 million | $14.9 million | 288,954 | 21.178 |
The top three are a little less shaky. It seems pretty clear, based on tracking, that “The Equalizer” will come out on top. It and “The Boxtrolls” have seen very similar unaided awareness numbers for weeks (and fairly close aided awareness numbers as well), but “The Equalizer” absolutely crushes its competition in terms of interest in actually seeing the movie. To me, this suggests that “Boxtrolls” is highly anticipated among dedicated film buffs — the people who would have known about it without being reminded — while “The Equalizer” is likely to draw in the more general audience — that is, the people who are likely to go to a movie this weekend, but haven’t decided ahead of time which one they’re going to see. This seems to be borne out by the social media activity for the two; “Boxtrolls” is killing “Equalizer” on Twitter, among a presumably younger and more invested audience (it takes more effort to tweet about a movie than to like it on Facebook), while “Equalizer” has edged out its competition on the older-skewing Facebook. “Boxtrolls” is also, of course, an animated movie that doesn’t come from Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks, which immediately puts it at a disadvantage.
There is a little wiggle room when it comes to the #2 and #3 spots. “The Maze Runner” won its first weekend with $32.5 million, so a 50 percent drop would put it in the $16 million range, and a 54 percent drop would put it a hair under $15 million. By comparison, fellow YA dystopia “Divergent” dropped 53 percent between its first and second weekends. “Boxtrolls” is from Laika, the same company that made “Coraline” and “ParaNorman.” The latter is an interesting comparison; like “Boxtrolls,” it opened in the same weekend as a big-name action movie (“The Expendables 2”) and the second week of a popular studio franchise (“The Bourne Legacy”). It came in third after those two movies in that order, with $14 million. I’m predicting slightly higher numbers than that for “Boxtrolls,” partially because of the goodwill that Laika’s previous films has bought the company, and partially because “ParaNorman” did about half as well as “Boxtrolls” on social media. I think that “Maze Runner” will eek out a win, but it’ll be close, and if “Boxtrolls” overperforms at all — or if “Maze Runner” loses a little more of its audience than expected — it could go the other way.
Rotten Tomatoes | IMDb | Metacritic | ||||
Critics | Users | # of Ratings | Stars | # of Ratings | ||
THE EQUALIZER | 57 | N/A | 39,313 | 8.0 | 1,707 | 49 |
THE MAZE RUNNER | 63 | 79 | 40,160 | 7.6 | 19,623 | 56 |
THE BOXTROLLS | 71 | N/A | 21,480 | 7.0 | 1,044 | 63 |
THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU | 43 | 71 | 17,674 | 6.7 | 1,839 | 44 |
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES | 67 | 64 | 19,456 | 7.0 | 3,933 | 57 |
(Sources: boxoffice.com, rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com, metacritic.com. 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.)