Chris Kyle Should Rule Over Time-Travelers And Kevin Costner (Box Office Predictions)

Another weekend, another opportunity for American Sniper to assume victory over your local movie theater. With February due to deliver several potentially huge hits, this last weekend of January seems to be the "calm before the storm", if you will, before some larger titles arrive. This means movie studios are not really releasing anything notable this weekend, but let's get to analyzing it anyway, shall we?


Of this week's three new releases, Project Almanac should be the biggest of the bunch. It gets a leg up on it's two competitors by being the only one opening in over 2000 theaters, though that won't be enough to make it a huge hit. Marketing has been OK, clearly establishing it's time-travel elements, but not really doing anything compelling with it. The movie Almanac is most directly emulating is Chronicle (another found-footage film released over Super Bowl weekend involving teenagers and sci-fi abilities) opened to $20 million in 2012, a number Almanac should fall quite short of.

It looks like this is the weekend of "Delayed 2014 Releases Finally Seeing The Light Of Day", considering Project Almanac was supposed to come out in February 2014, while this weekends second new release, The Loft, was supposed to be released over Labor Day weekend in 2014 by Universal Pictures. Now Open Road Films is handling it, and their lack of confidence in the project is blatant since they're giving the film their second smallest wide theater count ever. I'll eat my hat if this one crosses $5 million.

Black Or White has some pretty big names, but this final new release for the weekend is still gonna struggle to get any attention. This Kevin Costner dramedy has garnered terrible reviews and has very little noticeable marketing. This should handily continue Costner's recent streak of duds, and help pace the way for American Sniper to claim victory over the box office for the third weekend a row. It's the second film over the past seven weeks to achieve that, along with the final Hobbit movie.

A Most Violent Year is expanding into wide release this weekend as well, becoming only the seventh movie from A24 to go into over 600 theaters. This one might be able to leverage some eye-catching marketing and big names into a solid haul, though don't expect anything record breaking.  $4,000 per theater sounds about right, giving it a decent $3.2 million weekend.

Below are my opening weekend and final gross predictions for this weekends new releases, as well as my predictions for this weekends box office top 5.

Project Almanac
Opening Weekend: $12 million
Total Gross: $28 million

The Loft
Opening Weekend: $3.8 million
Total Gross: $8 million

Black Or White
Opening Weekend: $4 million
Total Gross: $11 million

1) American Sniper: $30 million
2) Project Almanac: $12 million
3) Paddington: $7.8 million
4) The Boy Next Door: $6.6 million
5) The Wedding Ringer: $6.1 million