With what appears to be the exception of a sensational hold for Argo, this weekend is looking fairly lackluster, according to preliminary Friday numbers at Deadline. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (Paramount) of course, will dominate the weekend, and because of its bargain-basement cost, it will reap plenty of profit for the studio. But at $15M (which includes $4.5M from shows that started as early as 9PM on Thursday night), its opening day is down more than 40% from the last Paranormal, and down 25% from Paranormal 2. It’s headed for around a $30M weekend, which is certainly lots of money for a picture that cost $5M to produce (not counting marketing), but suggests the series is well past its peak.
Here’s a rule of thumb: when a studio starts spinning how low the budget was for one of its major offerings, that movie is underperforming. Another example is ALEX CROSS (Summit/Lionsgate), which the studio wants everyone to know cost only $25M or thereabouts (again, without marketing). That’s nice, but a $4.5M opening day that probably means around a $12M weekend is far from impressive–less than half the opening day for Tyler Perry’s last Madea movie, and even down about 20% from Good Deeds, which didn’t feature the Madea character. It’s hard to see the franchise value in a picture unlikely to make more than $30-35M in total.
Now for the good news. ARGO (Warners) is reporting a drop of less than 10% from its opening day last week, and since movies tend to be less front-loaded in their 2d weekends than their first, the film could end up almost even for the weekend while adding only a negligible number of theatres, meaning its word of mouth is fantastic. Apart from guaranteeing a long and profitable run, this is going to boost the picture’s Oscar hopes.
As for other holdovers, TAKEN 2 (20th) should be down a pretty good 40% or so to $13-14M in its 3d weekend, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (Sony) down only about 10% to $15.5M, SINISTER (Lionsgate) down an expected 50+% to $8.5-9M, HERE COMES THE BOOM (Sony) down around 20% to $9.5M, PITCH PERFECT (Universal) down about 25% to $7M, FRANKENWEENIE (Disney) down 20% to $5.5M, and LOOPER (TriStar/Sony/FilmDistrict) down about 30% to $4M.
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