Friday Box Office Analysis
by Tim Briody
July 13, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In a bit of an upset, your number one film on Friday is [bp:1130_]Adam Sandler[/bp]'s Grown Ups 2 with $16.2 million. In another slight upset, that's an improvement on the $14.4 million opening day of Grown Ups back in 2010. This is a big enough lead over Despicable Me 2 that it unless it turns out to be very heavily front loaded, it should hang on over the rest of the weekend. After resisting for years, Sandler's first venture into sequels has to be considered a success, despite some of the worst reviews of the year. (Coming soon: Billy Madison 2! Happy Gilmore 2! Little Nic…uh, nevermind.) A weekend of $45.3 million should be good enough for a surprise weekend win.
Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro's mega-budget epic Pacific Rim earned $14.4 million on Friday, with a couple million of that attributed to late Thursday showings. Despite a deluge of advertising in the last two weeks, Pacific Rim seems to not have expanded its audience past the people who were going to see this from day it was initially revealed. No huge names in the cast without an immediate franchise tie- in also explain this total. Its importance has declined over the last decade, but star power still counts for something (see [bp:78_]Brad Pitt[/bp] in World War Z.) It's going to have to lean heavily on overseas grosses to make back that reported $200 million budget. Pacific Rim will have a fairly underwhelming weekend of $39 million.
Despicable Me 2
The minions drop 56% from last Friday to $13.3 million, which is good for third place on this Friday. Normally Despicable Me 2 would be a lock to leap over Grown Ups 2 and Pacific Rim to hang on to first place for the weekend, but in the summer weekend multipliers for animated/family films are lowered (Despicable Me's second weekend multiplier was 3.23) since it makes up for it with impressive weekday figures. So it'll have to settle for second place and crossing $200 million in merely its 12th day of release. Look for a second weekend of $43.2 million.