Friday Box Office Analysis

By Kim Hollis and David Mumpower

March 19, 2016

Don't you people want to know how my story will end?

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And oh, by the way, Allegiant’s budget was the same as Insurgent’s. Even with international revenue factored in, there is no way Allegiant is going to show a profit. Let’s first of all go ahead and get the weekend extrapolation out of the way. Divergent had a 2.39 multiplier (opening weekend divided by Friday revenue), while Insurgent had a 2.47. Even if we allow for a slightly better one due to the fact that we’re playing with lower numbers (we’ll call it a 2.5), we’re looking at a probable estimated opening weekend of $30 million - and that’s probably being generous. That’s a horrific decline from the debut weekends of the first two films, and portends poorly for the long-term box office prospects of Allegiant. It’s not even going to make $100 million domestically. In fact, if it’s somehow “lucky” enough to match the 2.5 opening-to-total box office multiplier of Insurgent, it might earn $75 million. Yikes.

And yet the hits are going to keep coming, because Lionsgate still has Ascendant on the box office schedule for June of 2017. Last month, Robert Schwentke, who had directed both Insurgent and Allegiant, decided to leave the production of the final film in the series. So, now Ascendant is a film with no director and will be coming off a predecessor that will be considered a bomb in pretty much every sense of the word. Currently, shooting for the film is scheduled to begin this summer, and Lionsgate is going to be looking at financing a movie that may only open in the mid-teens after the dark cloud that hangs over Allegiant finishes with its tempestuous storm. We all know that splitting books into two films is a brazen money grab, but this might be the first time where using the strategy actually results in a true loss. The production team behind the Chronicles of Narnia films really doesn’t get enough credit for knowing when it was time to quit.




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There were a couple of other new releases this weekend. The first of these is the latest faith-based film, Miracles from Heaven. Featuring Jennifer Garner and Queen Latifah in the story of a little girl who begins to show signs of recovery from an incurable disorder after a “visit” to heaven, the film earned a decent $4.2 million yesterday after taking in $3.6 million over Wednesday and Thursday. Its weekend total should be right at $12 million. Considering that the budget from this TriStar production was just $13 million, the people behind Miracles from Heaven will be perfectly content with this debut.

Our last opener appears on only 1,167 screens, but even those were way, way, way too many. The Bronze, which features The Big Bang Theory’s Melissa Rauch as both screenwriter and star, opened yesterday with just $130,000. You read that right. It might pull off $350,000 for the weekend if it’s lucky. Let us never speak of it again.

What all this means is that Zootopia will spend a third (and final) weekend at the top of the box office charts. It was down just 20% from last Friday’s already strong $12.1 million, meaning that have a weekend of about $41 million.


Projected Estimates for the Top Ten (Three-Day)
Projected
Rank
Film
Estimated Gross
1 Zootopia 41.0
2 The Divergent Series: Allegiant 30.0
3 10 Cloverfield Lane 12.3
4 Miracles from Heaven 12.0
5 Deadpool 8.7
6 London Has Fallen 7.6
7 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot 2.8
8 The Perfect Match 2.4
9 The Brothers Grimsby 1.3
10 The Revenant 1.2

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