It’s looking like another dim weekend at the box office. According to preliminary numbers at Deadline, THE MAZE RUNNER (20th) will easily race past its weak competition. With $11M on Friday (that includes $1.1M from Thursday night), it should hit $28-30M for the weekend, unless it turns out to be unduly frontloaded (always a possibility with teen-targeted movies). That’s far from the $22.8M opening day and $54.6M weekend of Divergent, let alone the Hunger Games-level mega-YA franchises, but Maze Runner was produced on a relatively modest budget of around $35M, and even though that number goes much higher when worldwide marketing costs are included, it’s on track for a fair level of success.
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES (Universal) is shaping up as one of Liam Neeson’s weaker recent vehicles, with less than $5M on Friday and a weekend that might hit $14M. That would be the lowest opening in a starring role of his post-Taken career. Tombstones, too, was inexpensive with a $25M production budget (and a smaller marketing spend than Maze Runner‘s), but it’s still looking problematic–especially with direct competition from The Equalizer coming next week.
THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU (Warners) will hope to follow the model of The Hundred-Foot Journey, which started with a $3.7M opening day and an $11M weekend, and with its older-skewing audience, has now topped $50M in the US. Leave You, which has a much more promotable cast, had a $4M Friday and could reach $12M by Sunday. It’s also low-budget by big-studio standards ($20M), although it was promoted with Warners’ usual big-ticket marketing campaign. While there are plenty of movies coming up for older audiences, Leave You has the comedy segment to itself for a while.
NO GOOD DEED (Screen Gems/Sony) plunged 65% from last Friday to $3M, heading for a $9M weekend. A DOLPHIN TALE 2 (Alcon/Warners) fell by about 50% from its opening day last week to $2.1M for an $8M weekend. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Marvel/Disney) should add another $5M to its vault this weekend, bringing it close to $320M in the US.
THE DROP (Fox Searchlight) was probably hurt by the arrival of Tombstones, which is aimed at exactly the same audience. Despite adding almost 50% more theatres, its Friday-to-Friday number was down 55% to $675K and a $2M weekend, with a per-theatre average that may not hit $2000. Even worse was Kevin Smith’s walrus-horror-comedy TUSK (A24), which may not get much above a $1000 average for the weekend at 602 theatres.
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