Can ‘The Hangover’ keep the party going three weeks in a row?
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From our friends at Company Town:
After two straight weeks of box-office domination, ‘The Hangover’ faces tough competition this weekend from another low-budget comedy, one that’s aimed at an entirely different audience.
Disney’s romantic comedy ‘The Proposal’ will post a solid opening in the mid-to-high-$20-million range, according to people who have seen pre-release audience polling results. There’s even a possibility, one executive at a competing studio indicated, that it could exceed $30 million. Its audience is expected to be almost overwhelmingly female, with most men buying tickets as an investment in romantic prospects.
As recently as early this week, ‘The Proposal’ was tracking a bit lower, but it has come on strong in today’s tracking reports, indicating that recent marketing and publicity efforts have caught audience’s attention. Based on anecdotal evidence, reports about costar Ryan Reynolds’ brief nudity certainly haven’t hurt.
Even if ‘The Proposal’ comes in lower than expected, it will still easily post the biggest opening weekend ever for a movie top-lined by Sandra Bullock, whose best debut to date was 2007’s ‘The Premonition,’ which bowed with $17.6 million in ticket sales. Her biggest romantic comedy debut was ‘Two Weeks Notice,’ which sold $14.3 million worth of tickets on its opening weekend in 2002.
Friday’s other new film, ‘Year One,’ has also risen fast in the tracking this week, based mostly on growing interest among teenage boys. After initially looking as though it could open in the low-mid-teens, the Jack Black and Michael Cera comedy is looking at first-weekend gross in the high teens or low-$20-million range. That would be a decent opening given that Sony Pictures spent about $60 million to produce the film.
Unless ‘The Proposal’ breaks out, the top four movies this weekend will be tightly packed on the box-office chart. ‘The Hangover’ has been performing very well all week -- its total domestic gross was $120.8 million as of Wednesday -- and probably will see another small week-over-week decline of about 25% on its third weekend, putting the three-day total at about $25 million.
Disney-Pixar’s ‘Up,’ which fell 35% on its second weekend and 31% on its third, will gross in the low-$20-million range this weekend if it continues that pattern. The animated feature has grossed a very healthy $198.9 million as of Wednesday.
-- Ben Fritz
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