SHOWBUZZDAILY EARLY FRIDAY BOXOFFICE – 10/26/12

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Preliminary numbers at Deadline show a tightly-bunched, none too impressive weekend underway at the boxoffice.  ARGO (Warners), SILENT HILL:  REVELATION (Open Road), CLOUD ATLAS (Warners) and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (Paramount) are all clustered around $3.5-4M for the day, which means it will be a question of dueling estimates on Saturday morning.  When the dust settles for the weekend, Argo with its proven strong word-of-mouth is expected to take the lead with around $12.5M, which would be another excellent hold, dropping only about 25% in its 3rd weekend.  Cloud Atlas may be a weak number 2 with a $10.5M weekend total, putting the $100M epic (not counting marketing costs) in a position where enormous overseas results will be its only chance of breaking even.  The two horror movies will duke it out for 3rd and 4th places, with Paranormal down about 65% from its shaky opening (about the same drop that Paranormal 3 had), and Silent Hill emerging with under a $3K per-theatre average for the weekend, as audiences are apparently horrored out before Halloween even hits.

Those results look good compared to FUN SIZE (Paramount), likely to have a $1500 per-theatre average for a $4.5M opening weekend, and CHASING MAVERICKS (20th), which may struggle to get much past a $1K average for a $2.5M weekend–at those numbers, it doesn’t matter how low the production budget was, it’s a dead loss in any case.

ALEX CROSS (Summit/Lionsgate) is headed for an expected 50% drop from last weekend to $5.7M, while TAKEN 2 (20th) should be down a more modest 40%, and HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (Sony), HERE COMES THE BOOM (Sony) and PITCH PERFECT (Universal) fall only around 35% each.