Pixels Crashes And Burns While Paper Towns And Southpaw Deliver Solid Results In Thursday Night Showings

The three new wide releases of this weekend got their box office runs started last night to differing results. First up, Paper Towns made a decent $2 million at Thursday night screenings last night. That's less than a quarter of the $8 million that The Fault In Our Stars made at Thursday night showings last year, though that book was more popular anyway and it had a super expensive screening on that evening that certainly boosted its grosses. This does guarantee that Paper Towns won't get anywhere near the opening weekend of last years film adaptation of a John Green novel, but that was to be expected. Look for Paper Towns to creep just above or below the $20 million mark for the weekend.



It should be noted that a lot of times Thursday night numbers are not perfect indicators of how a movie will perform at the box office in the long run. Still, there are times when Thursday night grosses are either so good (the Thursday night grosses for Pitch Perfect 2 announced that the movie was an overperforming hit) or bad that they do sum up how a film will do in its domestic box office run.

This is all a long winded way of saying that the Thursday night grosses for Pixels last night were so abysmal that it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that this ones doomed at the domestic box office. Pixels only brought in $1.5 million last night, which is the sort of number that is hard to compare to its summer 2015 blockbuster brethren simply because the grosses are so small (even Terminator: Genisys managed to gross $2.3 million in its Thursday night debut). More apt comparisons can be found in sci-fi features that debuted in the first quarter of 2015; Pixels did manage to double the $750,000 that Chappie made back in March, though it did so without the Digital 3D ticket prices that Pixels has. It's also made 50% more than the $1 million Jupiter Ascending grossed in Thursday night screenings back in February.

Neither of those comparisons are flattering at all in terms of domestic box office gross and both of those films failed to crack $20 million in their opening weekend. Pixels is very likely to share a similar fate, especially since summer movies tend to be more front loaded. Even on a more modest (by summer blockbuster standards) $90 million budget, Pixels will need a miracle to not be considered one of the biggest box office bombs of the year by the time its opening weekend is done.

Southpaw was actually the surprise of last night, taking in $1.2 million, a very nice result for an R-rated drama at Thursday night showings. There's actually a good chance Southpaw makes more than Pixels this weekend, which is something I'm not sure anyone thought was possible before now. Expect this one to gross in the $16-18 million range for its opening weekend.

In the box office predictions I wrote up yesterday, I noted that four movies (Paper Towns, Pixels, Minions and Ant-Man) were vying for first place. These Thursday night results pretty much guarantee that one of two holdovers (Minions and Ant-Man) will be number one this weekend. Both have been neck and neck in weekday numbers, with Minions leading by less than $100 thousand for the past two days. It's really anyone's guess who will come out on top this coming weekend, though I'll wager that Ant-Man squeaks back into first place with a $26 million second weekend.