Friday Estimates by KladyBall
Brad Pitt’s Moneyball is running about $200k a head of the Friday opening of 2008’s Burn After Reading. It will take a bit of a surprise bump to get it to $20m for the weekend.
Meanwhile, if The Lion King re-release in 3D repeats its weekend multiple from last weekend, it will gross $20.3 million and likely win the weekend… if not by Sunday estimates, then by “actuals” on Monday.
We’re long way from knowing what the final story on Moneyball‘s box office run will be. Burn After Reading did about 3.1x opening… The Social Network about 4.3x opening. TSN ended up doing better overseas than at home. That will be a bigger challenge for the baseball-themed Moneyball, but Brad Pitt is a monster internationally and may turn that trick, making the film profitable… which is why studios so desperately want to be in the Pitt business.
Though Deadline is working overtime – even during vacations (moving from the office to the living room) – to suck up to three of its favorite contributors/editors/whisperers, the Oscar hype around Moneyball right now is marketing hype… praying to get to a bigger theatrical multiple. and this is not a great or good opening for Taylor Lautner’s first massively stupid payday.
The question of this week, as with all too many weeks, is why would two distributors put two single-quadrant movies chasing the same quadrant out on the same weekend? And add to the stupidity by putting them both against Brad Pitt, who is sure to eat some of their demo, even if his movie doesn’t quite fit. I just don’t get it. Perhaps teen girls make the estimated $400k difference between ABduction and Killer Elite, but it’s not s realistic play for Twilight‘s Jon Cena wannabe.
Dolphin Tale seems like a bit of a shock in its slot. It could match the opening of last year’s Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole and had WB thought it had this potential, they might have moved it away from LK3D so it could breath a little. There’s not really another kids movie in the marketplace until the end of October.
Drive‘s hold is disappointing, $30m and change domestically looking like the glass ceiling for the film. They should be whipping the Albert Brooks Oscar potential hard right now. DVDs should be in Academy mailboxes by mid-October. Not sure that they will be.
Contagion is holding well, but is also paying a price for the crowded market for adult action. (For the record… opening day was 20% better than Moneyball and the weekend multiple was 2.8x Friday estimates.)
Don’t get me wrong. I am not fighting against Moneyball. I’m just not terribly susceptible to hype. It the film earns that audience, god bless it. It’s a very good film. But I’m still not sure that real world audiences will love it the way critics do. And opening day, as always, is not about the film itself. So we’ll see…
Nikki’s spin on Abduction is a masterpiece.
Oh, at least, it was yesterday. She toned it down to a reasonable level in her updates.
So it apparently hit in the middle ground of what Sony “told” here. Baseball is a tough sell and it’s even tougher when the movie seems like a personal story more than anything else.
Yes, Finke’s sucking up to Lautner was jaw dropping. Wow. I don’t get how she can slam others with such fury for “selling out” or cutting deals to go soft on a story, when it is obvious she does the same thing all the time. More than once, negative comments have disappeared after being posted for a day. A week later, a studio exclusive appears. I remember one weekend that over 100 comments disappeared when some Warner movie bombed. A week later she was dropping Warner exclusives. But this Lautner thing really takes the cake for how transparent it all is.
I saw Moneyball and could see it getting some Oscar noms the same way The Blind Side did. Pitt is likeable and delivers the same way Sandra Bullock did. I cringed at the thought of The Blind Side being another white angel movie, which it did have, but it really wasn’t an issue. The film, (Moneyball), is good for what it is not. It had the potential to be a real color by numbers, cliche sports structured film but that wasn’t an issue. And as much as I liked The Social Network, with Sorkin on the script, I worried about an overly chatty, venturing on didactic film. Not the case.
It may not seem like an Oscar film because it’s not a really big film. Neither were Juno nor Little Miss Sunshine. While I’m not saying they did or didn’t deserve as much award love as they got, I would applaud each for exercising a lot of self control in not trying to make themselves bigger than they needed to be or could’ve been.
What were the comparative numbers on Thomas Crowne? Maybe they don’t seem like fair comps but I’d think every apology made about that film’s opening would hold true for this. While I did not see Crowne, (is that the name of the Hanks/Roberts film that came out this summer?? Wait, sorry, Larry Crowne), I could see high retention w/an expected slower build. Wouldn’t this be a case of people not needing to rush out to see this film opening w/e? I think it tops $65M dom. Yeah, it’s baseball but it’s a pretty simple movie to get into. Social Network was by no means hard to follow but this film is much lighter to digest. Also much more straight forward and entertaining than Burn After Reading.