Tony Stark And Crew To Topple Reese Witherspoon And Duo Of Indie Releases

It's all but certain that The Avengers will win the box office again, but how will Hot Pursuit, The D-Train and Ex Machina (which is massively expanding its theater count) fare this weekend? Well, I've got some thoughts!



The first Avengers movie lost only 50% in its second weekend, one of the tiniest dips for a film opening to over $100 million (only Shrek 2, Spider-Man and Toy Story 3 had smaller drops while having an opening weekend north of that nine-digit number). Avengers: Age of Ultron won't have that tiny of a plummet, but it'll likely have a slightly better hold than usual thanks to the Mayweather boxing match last weekend diluting its extremely lucrative Saturday night numbers. For comparisons sake, the first Avengers went up 12% from Friday (not counting its Midnight grosses) to Saturday, whereas Age of Ultron actually went down .5%.

That's an unusual drop that won't occur this frame, with its forthcoming Saturday likely increasing just under or over 50% this coming Friday. That should help to counterbalance the massive plummet it'll have from this Friday to last Friday, since AoU got a huge boost on its opening from Thursday night grosses. Expect the largest second Friday dip in the history of the MCU, likely around 75%, but a healthy Saturday to stabilize things mightily to a 55% dip for the weekend as a whole.

Competing against those mighty heroes is Hot Pursuit, a new comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara. This is the first major comedic lead role for Witherspoon since This Means War, which opened to $17 million in February 2012 and How Do You Know in December 2010, which bombed with only a $7.4 million opening. Her newest vehicle is likely to perform slightly better than the former and much better than the latter, though dismal reviews and subpar marketing will likely keep it from cracking $20 million.

IFC Films has only put two films into wide release in their history of being a movie studio, and surprisingly, that number increases by 50% to three movies this weekend with the real of The D-Train which is looking to open into north of 700 theaters. There isn't a large amount of buzz surrounding this Jack Black feature, bit it'll likely have an OK per theater average and wind up with a number between $2-2.5 million.

Over the April 24-26, 2015 frame, Ex Machina impressed with a $5.3 million debut in wide release. The release of Avengers and that aforementioned boxing match last weekend prevented them from furthering expanding the movie, but this weekend, A24 is bringing the movie back with a vengeance, bringing it into over 2000 theaters. That's a large enough expansion to give the movie a financial boost and crack the box office Top 5, though it's unlikely to match it's wide release opening weekend haul.

It should be noted that the holdovers at the box office will have much smaller dips than usual this weekend thanks to a certain boxing match diluting Saturday grosses last weekend. Keep that in mind as you check out my projections for this weekends Top 5, as well as my opening weekend and final gross predictions for this weekends new releases.

Hot Pursuit
Opening Weekend: $18 million
Total Gross: $44 million

The D-Train
Opening Weekend: $2.3 million
Total Gross: $6 million

1) Avengers: Age of Ultorn: $89 million
2) Hot Pursuit: $18 million
3) Furious 7: $4.6 million
4) Ex Machina: $4.2 million
5) The Age of Adelina: $4 million