Your Complete Weekend Box Office Tracking, Predictions, & Analysis (04.09.15)

	FURIOUS 7	$70 million
	HOME	$16 million
	THE LONGEST RIDE	$14 million
	CINDERELLA	$7 million
	GET HARD	$5 million

With Furious 7 keeping a stranglehold on the first-place spot — it took in $140 million in its opening weekend, making a second-weekend haul of less than $60 million pretty much out of the question — the real race this week is for the #2 spot. There’s only one new movie out this week, Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride, undoubtedly due to the fact that studios knew that Furious 7 would be clearing the waters. (Next week is pretty loaded as a result, with four new releases.)

The Longest Ride is probably the best counter-programming you could hope for against Furious 7, unless you happen to have a surefire kids’ movie hit on your hands. Its romantic themes tap into the female demographic that is slightly less into Furious 7. But the key word there is “slightly”; in its opening weekend, female interest in Furious 7 was tracking at well above 50 percent, while female interest in The Longest Ride is hovering between 30 and 40. There are women who will want to take in a romance rather than an action flick, and will bring their boyfriends along — the “date night” demographic — but against a movie with the kind of broad appeal that Furious 7 brings to the table, The Longest Ride can’t count on too many of them.

Meanwhile, Dreamworks’ latest offering, Home, blew projections out of the water in its opening weekend, and limited its drop to a respectable 48 percent in its second week. The only other family-friendly option on the table at the moment is Cinderella, which is fading into its fifth week. Home will almost certainly see a smaller drop in its third week; if it limits its audience loss to 40 percent, which is very much within its power, it should easily hold on to second place.

	Opening Weekend	Current Gross	Facebook Likes	Tweets
FURIOUS 7	$147,187,040 million	$183,701,580 million	55,512,169	40481
HOME	$52,107,731 million	$107,467,622 million	546,082	–
CINDERELLA	$67,877,361 million	$172,210,312 million	13,367,992	3439
GET HARD	$33,803,253 million	$61,393,242 million	200,651	1583
INSURGENT	$52,263,680 million	$107,033,603 million	4,933,894	33532

The final two films in contention this week are Cinderella and Get Hard. (Insurgent, last week’s fifth-place winner, only lost to Cinderella by about $50,000, but of the two, it’s clearly fading faster.) Cinderella was fourth and Get Hard was third last week, but I imagine they’ll switch places this weekend. Get Hard lost a lot of audience to Furious 7, dropping 60 percent between its first and second weekends, and I doubt it’ll win many people back. Cinderella, meanwhile, is Furious-proof in much the same way that Home is; it dropped only 40 percent last week. If both movies repeat those performances this weekend — or even if Get Hard improves a little, and Cinderella falters a little — Cinderella should hold its fourth-place position, with Get Hard falling to fifth.

	Rotten Tomatoes			IMDb		Metacritic
	Critics	Users	# of Ratings	Stars	# of Ratings
FURIOUS 7	82	89	150,898	8.1	73,309	67
HOME	46	69	28,145	6.8	7,047	55
CINDERELLA	84	85	50,504	7.5	28,697	67
GET HARD	29	59	32,950	6.3	6,424	34
INSURGENT	31	67	54,428	7.0	31,073	42

(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.)

Madelyn Glymour | Contributor