Furious 7 Is About To Zoom Off To A Huge Opening Weekend (Box Office Predictions)

Unless Home pulls off a second weekend like the box office has never seen before, Furious 7 will be number one this weekend. This is easily gonna be one of the biggest movies of the year and garner the largest April opening weekend of all-time. The primary question on everyone's mind right now though is how big this one goes.

Six years, Fast & Furious astounded everyone by opening on this exact same date and weekend (though Good Friday occurred a week later in 2009) and claiming a $70 million opening weekend, easily becoming the biggest April opening of all-time. Fast Five opened in the last weekend of April 2011 to claim that title, making $86 million in it's first three days. Fast & Furious 6 deviated from it's predecessors though, opening over Memorial Day 2013 to a $97 million opening.

Furious 7 should have no problem surpassing that number, thanks to a number of obvious factors, including the fact that the last two movies have an incredibly positive reputation, not to mention that reviews for this entry are astonishingly positive. Ads have also done a great job creating new memorable action moments (Vin Diesel is riding a car between buildings!!!) and highlighting Jason Statham as the movies villain, an unconventional role for the actor.

So where does this one go for it's opening weekend? Truth be told, I think it has a bigger opening than any movie in 2014, which would give this one the largest opening weekend since The Hunger Games: Catching Fire seventeen months ago in November 2013. I'm thinking about a 30% increase from the sixth one's opening weekend, to $125 million, sounds about right.

Not too much to talk about in terms of holdovers, though it'll be interesting to see how last weekends new releases hold. Home is performing differently over the week than past late March DreamWorks releases like How To Train Your Dragon, so it's difficult to predict how it'll hold over the weekend. I'll say a low-40% hold, which would be more than that 2010 feature as well as The Croods. On the other hand, Get Hard should actually have a pretty solid hold this weekend even in the face of Furious 7, thank to the fact that it wasn't as reliant on Saturday and Sunday grosses in it's opening weekend, which means grosses being mildly diluted on Easter Sunday won't affect this particular movie as much, This should lead to a smaller second weekend hold than usually, likely in the mid-high 30%'s.

Below you can see my opening weekend and final gross predictions for Furious 7, as well as my projections for this weekends box office top 5.

Furious 7
Opening Weekend: $125 million
Total Gross: $285 million

1) Furious 7: $125 million
2) Home: $29 million
3) Get Hard: $21 million
4) Insurgent: $13.8 million
5) Cinderella: $10 million