Friday Box Office Analysis
By Kim Hollis
March 2, 2019
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Alt subtitle for this movie: Too Many Tyler Perrys

People must foolishly believe that Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral will put an end to the franchise, because enough of them attended the latest movie in the series that it's going to finish in the middle tier for openings for the character.

With the ninth film in the Madea franchise, Tyler Perry and friends have a solid Friday total of $9.2 million. Considering that the other, more recent movies in the series had shown some decline and fatigue, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this result. One thing to remember about Madea movies (and other films with Perry's name attached to them) is that they typically start out strong on Friday and then fall apart a bit over the remainder of the weekend. I see no reason that trend wouldn't continue in this case, which means that Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral should come in with around $25 million for the weekend. I'd guess that the budget was kept low, so Lionsgate will once again celebrate Perry's built-in audience.

The other new release this weekend was Greta from Focus Features. A psychological thriller about a young woman who encounters a mother figure, there was never any reason to think this project was going to break out. Frankly, I'm a little surprised it got a sort of wide release, as it feels a lot more like straight-to-Netflix material. At least it had good stars in Chloƫ Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert, but it's a little disappointing that this film is what director Neil Jordan delivers after a 12-year absence. With a small $1.6 million total, it should finish with $4.2 million for the weekend.

If you're wondering about the various Oscar winners and the bump they might have gotten from last weekend's ceremony, the only one with any real impact was Green Book, the Best Picture winner. With $1.2 million yesterday, a 110 percent increase from last Friday, the weekend total should be close to $4 million.

Our winner from last weekend, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World had a bit of a heady decline from last Friday, as we're pretty sure people rushed out to see it on opening day, assuming they didn't pay for the early screening a few weekends ago. It didn't perform much differently from How to Train Your Dragon 2, though. The second film had a decline of 59 percent on its first Friday, while Hidden World dropped 62 percent. It will of course straighten out a fair amount over the weekend day portion of the frame, and the three-day total will be $28 million or so. I think it'll beat Madea.