‘Inside Out 2’ Will Prevail At Weekend Box Office, But ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ & ‘Horizon’ Look To Provide Depth To Marketplace – Preview
Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros.
It’s Disney/Pixar’s weekend to lose with the third session of Inside Out 2 expected to do $55M-$60M, maybe even more. At the pace that it’s going, many believe it will blow past the final domestic of Illumination/Universal’s Super Mario Bros Movie which wound up with $574.9M.
As such, exhibition, and studios overall, have what they’ve been craving for since the strikes settled: A full bodied marketplace. Enter Paramount’s prequel A Quiet Place: Day One set on the first day when the big eared, sound sensitive aliens invaded New York City with Pig director Michael Sarnoski taking over for John Krasinski, who directed the first two chapter of the franchise and is producing here. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Djimon Hounsou and Alex Wolff star. Expectation is an opening of $40M+, the big swing factor here being walk-up business from Latino and Hispanic moviegoers, a demo which has been providing much fire to the rebounding box office. Diversity demos are strong as well as the under 35 demo on the PG-13 genre movie which is booked at 3,700 locations. Previews start Thursday at 3PM.
Previous openings for A Quiet Place 1 and 2 respectively were $50.2M and $47.5M. The overall global franchise is running at $638.2M.
The movie is also going out in 59 offshore markets including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Spain, Taiwan and the UK. No Rotten Tomatoes reviews yet. The world premiere is tomorrow night in New York City.
New Line’s Horizon: An American Saga, which is a domestic service deal for Warner Bros. Costner is on the hook for the production cost and P&A, the combined first two movies costing a reported $100M. Movie is tracking for a $10M-$12M start at 3,300 theaters. Even though that’s not a rich enough amount of cash for a movie that cost $50M, it’s more traffic for cinemas, hence better for the overall ecosystem. This movie is 3 hours long versus A Quiet Place: Day One‘s 1 hour and 40 minutes. The only one coming to this movie are men over 50. Previews start at 3PM. Coming away from its Cannes Film Festival world premiere (Warners doesn’t have rights for the western in France), the movie which follows the 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west, has a 47% Rotten rating with film reviewers. Hopefully Yellowstone audiences in the flyover states realize that if they want to watch Costner going forward on a horse and with a pistol and a hat, they’ll have to head to the cinema.