PAIN & GAIN (Paramount) may take the last weekend before the summer movie season starts, but based on the preliminary numbers at Deadline, it’s not going to win very impressively, with a $7M Thursday night/Friday that should give it a $17-19M weekend, right where Mitch Metcalf’s weekend predictions had put it. Pain was shot on a low budget by Michael Bay standards, but it still had a full-on studio marketing campaign, and seems unlikely to be any kind of a hit–especially with Iron Man 3 engulfing multiplexes next week.
Pain is a blockbuster, however, compared with the day’s other wide opening, the atrocious THE BIG WEDDING (Lionsgate), which is rightly revolting moviegoers with a $2.6M Friday that should mean a $7-8M weekend, even lower than predicted. It won’t come close to earning back its marketing spend, let alone its $35M production cost.
Right behind Pain & Gain, and with an outside chance of pulling ahead for the weekend depending on how word of mouth goes, is last week’s #1 OBLIVION (Universal), but its makers have nothing to celebrate either. The Tom Cruise vehicle took a 60% hit from last Friday to $5.3M, and even though that should stabilize over the course of the weekend, it’s still likely to decline well over 50% by Sunday for a $17M weekend. There seems to be little chance of Oblivion reaching $100M in the US with such a fast decline, so it’ll need a big boost from overseas ticket sales to have any hope of making back its $250-275M production/marketing cost.
Other holdovers were in better shape, with 42 (Warners) down about 45% Friday-to-Friday and heading for perhaps $90M at the US boxoffice, THE CROODS (DreamWorks Animation/20th) down about 35%, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES (Focus/Universal) down about 47%, GI JOE: RETALIATION (Paramount/MGM) down about 39%, and OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (FilmDistrict) down about 40%.
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