Your Complete Weekend Box Office Tracking, Predictions, & Analysis (01.15.15)

by: Madelyn Glymour | Contributor

	AMERICAN SNIPER	$45 million
	THE WEDDING RINGER	$25 million
	TAKEN 3	$18 million
	PADDINGTON	$15 million
	SELMA	$9 million

This week’s box office is such a mess. The spread of incoming releases — an Oscar contender, a Kevin Hart comedy, a mass-market family film, and a mid-budget thriller — isn’t out of place for the third weekend in January, but a weird confluence of Oscar snubs, CGI snafus, and thinkpiece culture has made their ordering hard to predict.

The one given seems to be that American Sniper will take the weekend. It probably would have taken it anyway, given its healthy tracking numbers, but this morning’s Oscar nominations, which included an upset nom for star Bradley Cooper in the Best Actor category, will undoubtedly vault it higher. Actually, Cooper’s nomination may have broader and weirder effects on this week’s box office, because the man who everyone expected to take his place in the nominations was David Oyelowo, star of Selma, which took second last weekend. But we’ll get there in a moment. Sniper is not a new release; it’s widening from its initial three-weekend, four-theater run, which netted it an astounding $3.4 million. Quite simply, American Sniper has the narrative right now, and it should ride it well into the $45 million range.

In the next tier of new releases are Paddington and The Wedding Ringer, both of which are likely to make money, but not American Sniper money. The Wedding Ringer seems sure to perform along the lines of Kevin Hart’s recent offerings; its interest and awareness numbers don’t touch Sniper‘s, but they’re a firm second-place this week, and it should easily take in somewhere in the $25 million range.

The real story here is Paddington, whose production and release has been plagued with problems: first, Colin Firth dropped out as the voice of Paddington late in production, and was replaced by Ben Whishaw; then, the movie’s release was pushed back from Christmas for reasons unknown. Neither of these are good signs, but Paddington has worse problems. For one thing, it’s based on a property that’s beloved in England, but virtually unknown stateside. (I’m sure plenty of Americans have heard of the Paddington books, but how many have read them?) And for another, there’s the bear itself. Paddington is a CGI bear in a live-action world, and there’s really no polite way to say it — he’s creepy. He’s dead-eyed and he looks like he’s about to murder you. That’s off-putting. Paddington may be very good — and reviews indicate that it is — but the bear is most people’s sole association with the movie, and it’s not a helpful one.

Taken together, these two problems make Paddington reminiscent of nothing so much as 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin, which is not auspicious company to keep. Tintin grossed $10 million in its opening weekend, but it had stiffer family-friendly competition and even less recognizability than Paddington. As the only kids’ movie currently on the table, I think Paddington will gross at least $15 million, but that puts it below the second week of Taken 3, even if Taken gets gutted — which seems likely, given the poor reviews and likely audience flight to American Sniper.

	Opening Weekend	Current Gross	Facebook Likes	Tweets
AMERICAN SNIPER	N/A	$3.373 million	689,029	198,965
THE WEDDING RINGER	N/A	N/A	373,847	10,075
TAKEN 3	$39.202 million	$47.043 million	5,278,812	170,732
PADDINGTON	N/A	N/A	552,769	11,800
SELMA	$11.307 million	$16.548 million	201,026	100,386

So that takes care of the top four. There are two likely candidates for #5: the Chris Hemsworth thriller Blackhat, and last week’s second-place finisher Selma. Blackhat actually has higher interest numbers than Paddington, and comparable to The Wedding Ringer, but it has two problems. The first is that its best demographics overlap heavily with American Sniper and Taken 3. The second is that its awareness numbers are very low. There just hasn’t been a great marketing push for Blackhat, and it shows. It’s also the movie coming out this weekend in the fewest theaters, with a count of only 2,400. Selma, for its part, is only in about 2,200 theaters, and made only $11 million last weekend. But its awareness is a lot higher than Blackhat‘s, and oddly, the Oscar snub may help it out.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Oyelowo wasn’t nominated for an Oscar — Paramount’s decision not to send out screeners to any awards other than the Oscars and the Golden Globes may have something to do with it, but nominations are always a vague and mysterious game. The fact remains, however, that Oyelowo’s omission has made the acting category nominations all-white, and director Ava DuVernay’s failure to score a nom has made the Best Director category all-male. Which means that lots of people are talking about Selma — almost as many as are talking about American Sniper, and often in the same breath. I don’t know if Selma will see an audience increase, but I’d imagine that the renewed buzz will result in a pretty high retention rate. It could drop as little as 20 percent. The passing over of Oyelowo and DuVernay is probably a bad thing for the Oscars — but it may, at least as far as this week’s box office goes, be a good thing for Selma.

	Rotten Tomatoes			IMDb		Metacritic
	Critics	Users	# of Ratings	Stars	# of Ratings
AMERICAN SNIPER	75	N/A	63,159	7.6	18,196	72
THE WEDDING RINGER	22	N/A	16,427	6.3	110	34
TAKEN 3	11	54	43,514	6.6	13,575	25
PADDINGTON	97	N/A	19,900	7.6	6,648	77
SELMA	99	89	25,605	7.7	5,558	89

(Sources: boxoffice.com, rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com, metacritic.com. Starred figures are estimates. Tweets represent figures for this week only. Figures represent numbers at time of writing, and may have changed. Tracking Board does not report Rotten Tomatoes user ratings for movies that have not yet seen wide release.)