Friday Box Office: 'X-Men: Apocalypse'

Friday Box Office: 'X-Men: Apocalypse' Drops 75%, Tops $100M As 'Alice' Plunges 67%

X-Men: Apocalypse’ image courtesy of 20th Century Fox

X-Men: Apocalypse earned just $6.55 million on its second Friday, down a harsh 75.1% from its opening $26.4m Friday (which included $8.2m in Thursday previews). Yes, we are at the point when films commonly earn more on their Thursday previews than they do on their eighth day of release. But a 75% drop isn’t remotely a franchise-low for this famously un-leggy series. X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Days of Future Past both opened on Memorial Day and they dropped 77 % ($10.3m) and 73% ($9.4m) on their second Fridays, respectively. And X-Men Origins: Wolverine plunged 75.8% ($8.3m) on its second Friday as well. It also crossed the $100m domestic mark, so there’s that.

More troubling is that it’s close to the same drop with smaller figures overall, and especially disconcerting is that it’s less than the $7.5 million (-64%) second Friday of X-Men: First Class back in 2011 and in 2D. If Apocalypse plays like the last two Memorial Day X-Men movies, it’ll earn around $21-$22 million in weekend two. If it plays like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it barely gets to $20m on weekend two. So we’re looking at a second-weekend drop of around 66% and a ten-day total of around $117m. It’s still looking like a $156-$167m domestic total.

That’s less than what Deadpool earned in its first week, and may be below the $157 million gross of X-Men and just above the $148m (from 2011 and in 2D) total of X-Men: First Class. but it may be irrelevant if overseas muscle pulls it out of the domestic fire. It will be interesting to see what’s to be done if X-Men basically becomes the comic book superhero franchise equivalent of the Ice Age franchise. That’s not the worst problem to have, but, again… interesting. As for the culprit, it’s less that the film was “rejected” by moviegoers so much that it didn’t make much of a ripple this week. Most of the conversation was about a somewhat grotesque poster/billboard of Jennifer Lawrence being choked by Oscar Isaac (in an otherwise solid campaign), so that’s not exactly a win.

But the other big Memorial Day debut, Alice Through the Looking Glass, has no real hope of rescue. The Walt Disney DIS +0.03% sequel earned $3.155 million yesterday, a 67.5% drop from its opening Friday for a new $43.24m cume. The ill-received (and unrequested) sequel is on is on track to earn $11 million this weekend, a 59% drop from last weekend’s underwhelming $27m Fri-Sun frame. The picture should have a $51m ten-day cume, and it took eight days just to top the $40.8m opening day of Alice in Wonderland. At this rate, the $170m Mia Wasikowska/Johnny Depp/Sasha Baron-Cohen picture will be lucky to top $75m in the states. It’s a real splotch in Disney’s otherwise stellar run, but it’s not one that should be entirely swept under the rug even as they prepare to drown in Finding Dory money.

Sony and Columbia’s The Angry Birds Movie (produced by Rovio, animated by Sony Imageworks) earned $2.6 million on its third Friday of release, a drop of 48% from last Friday. The $73m animated video game adaptation should make around $9.7m on its third weekend (-50%) for an $86m domestic cume. That will put it just past Pokémon: The Movie ($85m) as the third-biggest video game adaptation of all time, just below Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ($90m). The $131m domestic total of Tomb Raider (back in 2001 and in 2D) may be out of reach. But with around $280m worldwide by the end of tomorrow, it’ll soon pass Resident Evil: Afterlife ($294m) to sit behind only Prince of Persia ($336m) among all video game adaptions. Your move, Warcraft.

source: Forbes