Your Complete Weekend Box Office Tracking, Predictions, & Analysis (02.26.15)

by: Madelyn Glymour | Contributor

	FOCUS	$25 million
	KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE	$11 million
	FIFTY SHADES OF GREY	$10 million
	THE LAZARUS EFFECT	$9 million
	THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER	$8 million

In the upcoming low-grossing weekend, not much is sure except the top spot. With Fifty Shades of Grey in freefall, Focus would have to dramatically underperform in order to lose out on first place. The Will Smith-Margot Robbie con artist movie has been marketed well, and it fits a profile (adult-oriented, undemanding action/thrillers) that is both profitable and long-missing from the cinema landscape. (If I’m not mistaken, the last entry in the genre was the undermarketed Blackhat last month, and prior to that, December’s The Gambler.) I doubt Focus‘ take will break the bank, but low- to mid-twenties seems about right.

Slots 2 – 5 are harder to suss out. It’s pretty clear which movies will be there: new release The Lazarus Effect and returning players Fifty Shades, Kingsman, and The Spongebob Movie. (Last week’s surprise successes, McFarland USA and The DUFF, will likely make an appearance only if one of those four takes a serious drop.) Predicting the order is harder, because each of those movies should take in somewhere between $8 and $11 million. Trying to place four movies within $3 million is a bit of a crapshoot; if a single movie under- or overperforms in the slightest, everything goes to hell.

	Opening Weekend	Current Gross	Facebook Likes	Tweets
FOCUS	N/A	N/A	201,541	54,255
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE	$36.206 million	$71.255 million	329,237	183,325
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY	$85.171 million	$133.274 million	9,418,562	279,845
THE LAZARUS EFFECT	N/A	N/A	82,707	11,218
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER	$55.365 million	$127.854 million	766,564	38,721

But we have to make some prediction, so here goes. Fifty Shades dropped nearly 3/4 of its audience between its first and second weeks. If it does the same this weekend, it’ll dip below $6 million. But another drop of that magnitude seems unlikely; for one thing, it’s been posting reasonably healthy weekday numbers, and for another, dropping 75 percent from $85 million is a lot different from losing the proportionate amount from $22 million. The 55 – 65 percent range seems more probable, putting Fifty Shades around $10 million.

Kingsman, on the other hand, posted a respectable 49 percent drop going into its second week, and has been getting some reasonably good word-of-mouth. (Seriously, take a look at its Twitter numbers; it’s outdoing Age of Ultron, at the moment, and those are mostly positive tweets.) It might limit its third-weekend drop to, say, 40 percent, giving it $11 million letting it overtake Fifty Shades for second place.

Projections have been giving horror movie The Lazarus Effect a $9 million debut, mostly because of low awareness and the generally lackluster response to off-season, unmarketed horror movies. Meanwhile, Spongebob will probably drop 40 – 50 percent of its audience, as it has in the past two weekends — and my guess is, going into its fourth weekend, it’ll be closer to 50 percent than 40, leaving it with just over $8 million, and the #5 spot.

	Rotten Tomatoes			IMDb		Metacritic
	Critics	Users	# of Ratings	Stars	# of Ratings
FOCUS	60	N/A	19,704	6.9	712	57
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE	73	88	74,972	8.3	52,098	59
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY	24	49	53,886	4.2	88,964	46
THE LAZARUS EFFECT	22	N/A	6,533	6.2	162	28
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER	75	62	29,669	6.7	7,172	63

(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.)