Without further ado, here is the second part of predictions for this summers box office!
Melissa McCarthy's newest film, Spy. is likely to be the highest grossing movie this summer that doesn't make it into the Top 10, thanks to marketing emphasizing memorable gags, McCarthy's fanbase and a prime early June release date that lets it play as counter programming to action fare like Jurassic World. Paper Towns should find similar success playing against the likes of Ant-Man and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, especially coming off last summer's The Fault In Our Stars, which, like Paper Towns, is based on a John Green novel.
Pitch Perfect 2, I have a hunch, is gonna really make big bucks this summer and should have no problem improving heavily over it's predecessors gross, likely to a final total over $100 million. Another sequel to a 2012 surprise hit, Magic Mike XXL, will also have no trouble generating large amounts of cash over the course over the 4th of July holiday. Taking a cue from past hit films released in August starring Meryl Streep like Julie & Julia and Hope Springs, Ricki and The Flash will likely become the newest, and perhaps biggest, film of it's ilk.
Warner Bros. has smartly positioned the military friendly film Max for a 4th of July release, which should result in solid results. Finally, Straight Outta Compton, which has had some extremely compelling trailers, is a feature that I think is gonna really break out come August, especially considering it has very little competition from other music driven biopics in that month.
Two summers ago, The Purge and The Conjuring proved you could launch successful horror movies during the most competitive months of the summer moviegoing season, and now the studios behind those two features (Warner Bros. and Focus Features, a sister company to Universal, who distributed The Purge) are looking to get two new horror movies, Insidious: Chapter 3 and Gallows, to similar success in the same release dates that their 2013 brethren had. However, it's hard to say if they'll achieve such goals, as each film has unique issues to face.
Insidious 3 is coming off two successful predecessors, but this newest entry is a prequel that ditches the original cast, while Gallows is opening in a far more competitive marketplace than The Conjuring. Similarly, it's hard to tell if Pan can replicate the success of those live-action remakes of classic Disney animated features, especially since it lacks the Disney brand name and is only opening two weeks after a Despicable Me sequel (such a release date didn't work out too well for Turbo, also released in summer 2013).
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. shares a lot of elements with director Guy Ritchie's last film, Sherlock Holmes (period piece, starring an actor who recently played a famous superhero, mismatched pair as leads), but these spies don't have anywhere near as big of brand recognition as Sherlock Holmes, and Henry Cavill isn't even remotely close to the level of fame Robert Downey Jr. has. Just recently scheduled for a late July release date, Vacation, a remake of National Lampoon's Vacation, will hope to have the kind of success We're The Millers had in the late months of summer 2013, and it does have a well-known cast (Ed Helms, Leslie Mann, Chris Hemsworth) though this one has bigger films to face at the box office than the ones Millers competed with.
Finally, the two new releases over the weekend of May 29th feel like they could go either way in my book. Aloha stars two actors coming off Oscar nominated turns in Best Picture nominated films, Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone, with Cooper particularly soaring in terms of fame right now thanks to American Sniper. That might sound like it makes Aloha a surefire win, but the trailer feels generic and it's unclear if future marketing can make it look more distinctive. The other movie, San Andreas, stars Dwayne Johnson, whose more popular films tend to be more light-hearted and fun (namely, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the Fast & Furious movies and Get Smart). His more serious efforts, like last years Hercules, tend to stumble at the box office, and the somber marketing for San Andreas may make it more of a dud than a hit for Johnson.
Before I get to two larger scale films that I predict will become box office duds, I'll take a moment to look at some smaller films that will likely underwhelm financially. Hot Pursuit, a comedic feature starring Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon, will likely become the first box office bomb of the summer, while Poltergeist, whose ads just make it look like a Conjuring rip-off to the uninitiated, will likely follow suit later in the month despite being released over the lucrative Memorial Day holiday.
Considering the fact that trailers just look like a mish-mash of noise and douchiness to those unaware of the original show, I'm almost certain Entourage: The Movie will become a dud at the box office come early June. On the more high profile side of things, I'm thinking, at this point, that Pixels becomes the newest Adam Sandler film to tank, following in the illustrious footsteps of Jack & Jill and That's My Boy. Those recent films, as well as others like Blended, are blatant proof Sandler's brand is on the slide, and it'll take more than this lame looking attempt at mining 80's nostalgia to reverse that financial downward spiral.
Another blockbuster that I'm guessing will fall short of expectations is Terminator: Genisys. This prediction comes with a major caveat however; this new Terminator movie is being distributed by Paramount Pictures, a studio that has released two movies (World War Z and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turltes) over the past two summers that I thought would be box office duds, but wound up becoming huge hits. So Ah-nolds newest robotic action adventure could surprise. Still, early promotional materials lean way too heavily on nostalgic callbacks ("I'll be back", "Come with me if you want to live", "There's a storm coming" are all said in early trailers and commercials), and the promise of seeing Arnold doing his Terminator schtick again may turn out to be not even that compelling considering his recent box office bombs (who remember Sabotage?) and his personal life scandals.
After Labor Day, I'll take a look back at my predictions and see how I did. We'll all be five months older then, so maybe by that time we'll all be aware of both the fragility of time and that I should stop underestimating Paramount's summer blockbusters.
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