Saturday
17May2008
A Less Than Regal Opening Day for 'Prince Caspian'
Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 10:29AM
For the third consecutive weekend, the box office will
prove to be a tough beast to tame. While lots of analysts expected
Iron Man to
christen summer with a huge take, not too many guessed $100 million-plus. And
while it became obvious in the days before its release that
Speed Racer would
struggle, even the lowest estimates were around $10 million more than the film
wound up making in its debut.
And for
Prince Caspian, the second film in The
Chronicles of Narnia, you were likely to find projections of $80 - $95 million;
in other words, it would have a strong weekend but not Iron Man strong. And
everyone was wrong...again.
Caspian opened with an anemic $19 million on
Friday, according to
Box Office Mojo, meaning anything over $65 million is out of the question this
weekend, which in turn means that the film won't be pushing $150 million by the
end of next week, which should mean the film will probably fall close to a
hundred million short of the domestic total of
The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe.
In all likelihood, Caspian will settle in between $55
and $60 million in its first three days, and that's a disturbing number for Narnia fans. The fate of the entire series rests on the success of this film and
its follow-up, 2010's
Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Even though the films are
almost guaranteed to turn a profit internationally, they're such massive
projects that Disney and Walden are not likely to keep dumping good money after
bad, and seeing diminishing returns on subsequent movies is not the way The House of
Mouse prefers doing business.
At least Prince Caspian is not losing as much ground as
Speed Racer. In its second week, the first flop of the summer is on pace to
barely lumber past $30 million in ticket sales; it will be outgrossed by
Baby
Mama.
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