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Deadline has preliminary numbers for Friday, and this won’t be one of those weekends where the winner is unclear up to the wire. ACT OF VALOR (Relativity), the low-budget (but highly marketed) Navy SEAL recruitment vehicle/action movie swept the day with over $9M, about 50% ahead of anything else. The only question now is how frontloaded it’ll turn out to be–one possible precedent could be The Expendables, which did 38% of its opening weekend business on Friday. if Valor follows that pattern, that could mean a weekend of around $23M. There’s no question about the frontloading of Tyler Perry’s films, and the 2d place GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit), with about $6M on Friday, should put it in the neighborhood of a $15M weekend. This would make it one of Perry’s lower-end openings (although his non-Madea pictures are always below the titles in that franchise).
Way, way back in the pack are the other new openings. WANDERLUST (Universal) only grossed around $2.5M on Friday, and a $7M weekend would make it one of the lowest non-indie openings of Jennifer Aniston’s career. And GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) proves that Amanda Seyfried’s name alone doesn’t sell tickets, as it couldn’t even hit $2M for the day and won’t get much beyond $5M for the weekend.
Among holdovers, GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE (Sony) will (unsurprisingly) collapse to about a 60% decline from last weekend, while THIS MEANS WAR (20th) should fall about 50%. The leggier SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) and JOURNEY 2 (Warners) are also holding well, especially the latter.
Stay with SHOWBUZZDAILY all weekend for updated boxoffice and analysis!
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