Your Complete Weekend Box Office Predictions, Tracking, & Analysis (12.11.14)

by: Madelyn Glymour | Contributor

	EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS	$25 million
	THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1	$11 million
	TOP FIVE	$9 million
	PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR	$5.5 million
	HORRIBLE BOSSES 2	$4 million

So, Exodus: Gods and Kings is going to beat Top Five. Actually, Exodus is going to absolutely trounce Top Five; it’s going to more than double its weekend gross. This despite the fact that Exodus has gotten middling reviews, while Top Five is being hailed as one of the best comedies of 2014, and certainly the best of Chris Rock’s career. Seriously, look at the critical numbers in the second chart below. Top Five has an 83 on Metacritic. You know what wide release movie currently has a higher score? Birdman. That’s it. There are a few limited releases that outstrip it — Whiplash, Force Majeure — but of the movies that are actually going to be watched outside New York and Los Angeles, Top Five is going to be considered one of the best of the year.

Now, for a movie that’s being released in just shy of a thousand theaters — less than a third of Exodus‘ 3,300 — this isn’t so bad. But it does make you wish that Top Five could be released in a few more theaters. Because if you look at the tracking, Exodus and Top Five have nearly identical interest levels. The demographics are a little different, but they both have the same average interest. The place where Exodus kills Top Five is awareness. It’s got double the unaided awareness and half again the total awareness. You can make the best movie in the world, one that would be universally adored, and it won’t matter at all if no one’s heard of it.

	Opening Weekend	Current Gross	Facebook Likes	Tweets
EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS	N/A	N/A	195,576	19,818
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1	$121.898 million	$261.377 million	–	–
TOP FIVE	N/A	N/A	361,693	11,035
PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR	$25.447 million	$50.52 million	–	–
HORRIBLE BOSSES 2	$15.457 million	$37.559 million	–	–

Anyway, there are three other movies in this week’s top five. Mockingjay is an obvious choice for second; if it drops 50 percent, it’ll take in $11 million, which is higher than even the most optimistic projections for Top Five. Penguins of Madagascar, on the other hand, took in about $11 million last week, and it would have to really limit its drop to beat Top Five‘s lowest projections, which seems unlikely for a movie in its third week that never even managed to kill off its family-friendly competition.

That leaves the #5 spot open, and it’s the most difficult to predict. Horrible Bosses 2 beat both Interstellar and Big Hero 6 last weekend, but by very little; all of them were within about $600,000 of each other, and if we’d only been counting Saturday and Sunday, Big Hero 6 would’ve won. But we’re not just counting Saturday and Sunday, so I’m going to go with Horrible Bosses 2, as the youngest movie on the list of contenders, and the one with the most momentum.

	Rotten Tomatoes			IMDb		Metacritic
	Critics	Users	# of Ratings	Stars	# of Ratings
EXCODUS: GODS AND KINGS	38	N/A	34,555	6.7	5,848	52
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1	66	76	201,336	7.2	82,201	64
TOP FIVE	91	N/A	5,888	6.4	537	83
PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR	71	68	43,914	7.2	6,007	53
HORRIBLE BOSSES 2	34	60	40,098	7	10,772	40

(Sources: boxoffice.com, rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com, metacritic.com. Hyphens indicate missing data. 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.)