Friday Estimates: Insidious Scares Spy Out of Top Spot
June 6, 2015
Insidious Chapter 3 came out on top on Friday's box office chart, at least according to the estimates. Its opening day haul of $10.4 million put it just ahead of Spy’s Friday box office of $10.3 million. (When we get the final numbers, it is not unlikely that these two will switch places.) However, while Insidious won the battle on Friday, it won’t win the war for the weekend. Horror films have much weaker internal multipliers (internal multiplier is the weekend total divided by the Friday box office). For example, Insidious Chapter 2 had an opening day of $20.23 million on its way to a $40.27 million weekend. Its internal multiplier was just 1.99. That’s low, even for a horror film. Insidious Chapter 3 should have a better multiplier than that, thanks to its better reviews, but not by a huge margin. It certainly won’t keep pace with Spy. Even $25 million is likely out of question with $23 million being the most likely result after Friday’s results. This might not be enough to keep pace with San Andreas by the end of the weekend.
Spy was next with $10.3 million and to judge its weekend potential, we need to compare it to both Bridesmaids and The Heat. It is much closer to the latter in terms of genre, but much closer to the former in terms of reviews. If it has the same internal multiplier as The Heat, it will finish the weekend with $29.4 million, which is on the very low end of expectations. On the other hand, if it matched Bridesmaids, it will earn $34.5 million over the weekend. Splitting the difference gives us a weekend haul of almost exactly $32 million. It will need good legs to get to $100 million, but with those reviews, it could deliver.
The final new release was Entourage which opened in first place on Wednesday, but fell to fourth place with $3.7 million on Friday. This means we have more numbers to look at, but it also means we have fewer films to compare it to. Compared to the lower end of Friday’s predictions, the film fell faster on Thursday, but bounced back better on Friday. So we need to find a film that opened on a Wednesday that wasn’t associated with a long weekend that fell more than 60% and bounced back on Friday, but also shares a genre / target audience. The closest I could come up with was The Pineapple Express and that film had better reviews. Looking at all of the data, Entourage should pull in $10 million to $11 million over the weekend for a five-day opening of about $18 million. It reportedly only cost $30 million to make, so this opening isn’t that bad.
On a side note, both What the Flick?! and Cracked had videos this week about Entourage. What the Flick?! has a discussion about whether or not the movie was satire, as the characters were so awful. Meanwhile, Cracked put forth the hypothesis that the TV show / movie is a cruel prank on the stars.
Filed under: Friday Estimates, Entourage, Spy!, Insidious Chapter 3, San Andreas