New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Meet the new boss, much different than the old set of bosses.

The Boss

Melissa McCarthy’s latest collaboration with her husband Ben Falcone earned $8.1 million on Friday, enough to put it $2 million ahead of previous #1 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice for Friday. This is pretty catastrophic news for Warner Bros. and DC, though probably right within expectations for a middling McCarthy comedy.

With just an 18% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes and a terrible C+ Cinemascore, The Boss is going to be regarded as one of her lesser works. At this point, McCarthy seems to be having a critical darling every other film… which hopefully bodes well for Ghostbusters despite uninspiring trailers. The Boss is going to wind up with a very similar debut to Tammy, a movie that had comparable Rotten Tomatoes and Cinemascore ratings. Look for an opening weekend of $21.4 million, right in line with what Tammy made in 2014.

Anyway, the biggest Melissa McCarthy news for us this week was that she joined the Gilmore Girls revival to reprise her role as Sookie St. James. We can’t wait.

Hardcore Henry

The first-person-shooter as movie from STX Entertainment earned $2 million on Friday. Considering that the film had a tiny budget of $10 million and will likely earn the bulk of its revenue on home video anyway, that’s a fine start and should lead to eventual profit for the upstart studio. It’s tough to do much better when people complain that your movie gives them motion sickness. Give it weekend total around $5.4 million before it fades into memory.

Demolition

Released into just 854 theaters by Fox Searchlight, Demolition never had much hope to make an impact this weekend. Clearly there was little studio confidence in this project, which was borne out by its middle-of-the-road fresh rating of 50% at Rotten Tomatoes. Generally, a smaller-scale release like this one needs to have certain critical support in order to capture audience attention (particularly when there are competing options like Eye in the Sky in theaters). Demolition earned $360,000 yesterday and finished well outside the top 10. It’s an inauspicious follow up to Dallas Buyers Club and Wild for director Jean-Marc Valée.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

After last weekend’s horrific Friday-to-Friday decline of 82%, I guess you could say that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice saw its prospects improve somewhat when it had only a 60% drop from last Friday. Of course, when you consider the fact that its second Friday was also contending with both Thursday preview numbers and Good Friday, things start to look a bit more demoralizing.

Ultimately, the race for first place between The Boss and Batman v Superman is going to be extremely close. Realistically, I’d predict that Batman v Superman will finish with $20.7 million. However, I think that Warner Bros. will take it just high enough that it manages a third weekend at the top. Call it $23 million and they’ll figure out the real numbers later. Either way, it’s a pretty terrible third weekend for a movie that a studio is planning its future on.

Projected Estimates for the Top Ten (Three-Day)
Projected Rank	Film	Estimated Gross
1	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice	23.0
2	The Boss	21.4
3	Zootopia	14.0
4	My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2	8.4
5	Hardcore Henry	5.4
6	Miracles from Heaven	5.2
7	God's Not Dead 2	4.6
8	The Divergent Series: Allegiant	4.0
9	10 Cloverfield Lane	3.2
10	Eye in the Sky	3.0