Weekend Box Office Forecast for July 22-24, 2016

By Tim Briody

July 22, 2016

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever know.

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The summer movie season continues to roll along with two more sequels, which might be problematic given how this year has gone so far, but at least these come with a pedigree.

Star Trek: Beyond is the third go around for the rebooted Star Trek franchise (with the first now seven years old already!) with J.J. Abrams passing directing duties on to Justin Lin, director of 4/7ths of the Fast and Furious franchise.

Having gone back to the Khan well in the last movie, the crew of the Enterprise (with all the major players returning, but more on that in a moment) is now on a five year mission to boldly go, yadda yadda, when a distress signal turns into something that sees the ship blown up real good and the crew separated on a strange planet.

As mentioned, Chris Pine is back as Captain Kirk, along with Zachary Quinto as Spock (no Spock Prime this time with the death of Leonard Nimoy in 2015), Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Karl Urban as Bones, John Cho as Sulu, Simon Pegg (who co-wrote this one) as Scotty and Anton Yelchin as Chekov in what will be his final major release after his sudden accidental death last month. For gravitas, Beyond adds Idris Elba as the film’s big bad.




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2013’s Into Darkness gave back about $9 million from the 2009 reboot’s $79.2 million opening weekend, and also dropped almost $30 million in overall box office, dropping from $257.7 million to $228.7 million. What we saw there (and in the majority of reboot sequels) is that things just aren’t as special the second time around. Into Darkness wasn’t a bad movie, but for whatever reason, fewer people cared. Beyond is bringing in reviews on par with the first film, which is a good sign (and means we may be establishing the trend with this reboot that the better movies are the odd ones), but it’s been a rough year to be a sequel and there’s just not enough buzz here (though the death of Yelchin made for some unfortunate free promotion) to recapture the magic from the reboot. Star Trek: Beyond takes another step back at the box office with a weekend of $61 million.

The long running Ice Age franchise may feel like a B-level player in the world of computer animation, but they’ve actually been reliable earners, with two films falling just short of $200 million and none doing any worse than $161 million (2012’s Continental Drift). The story takes a weird turn when you find out that both Continental Drift and 2009’s Dawn of the Dinosaurs rank in the top 50 movies in all time worldwide grosses, earning $879.7 million and $859.7 million worldwide respectively. So while a fifth entry was inevitable anyway, Ice Age: Collision Course is one of the first of many films that exists primarily for international audiences.

This time around, that rascally rascal Scrat accidentally launches some asteroids towards the Earth (look, just go with it), and it’s up to Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the Sabertooth Tiger (Denis Leary) to save the day again, somehow.


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