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'Cowboys & Aliens' Vs 'Smurfs' Too Close To Call Friday With 'Crazy Stupid Love' #4
By
NIKKI FINKE | Friday July 29, 2011 @ 11:01pm
FRIDAY PM/SATURDAY AM, 2ND UPDATE: What's more humiliating than Hollywood execs overestimating opening day for
Cowboys & Aliens and having it fall short? Having the well-pedigreed motion picture with big Hollywood writers (Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman), stars (Daniel Craig & Harrison Ford), director (Jon Favreau), and producers (Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, & Brian Grazer) beaten at the box office by
The Smurfs. Talk about humiliation! Especially with
Smurfs playing in 355 less North American theaters than
Cowboys but charging higher 3D ticket prices. By late night Friday, it became clear that not only was the Western/scifi mashup from DreamWorks and Relativity and Imagine and Universal (distributing domestic only with Paramount taking foreign)
not doing the predicted $45 million for the weekend, but that it was running neck-and-neck with Sony Pictures' little blue guys toon for first place Friday and may not even get to $40M weekend grosses. "
Cowboys & Aliens did not get any late night young male business -- hence the reason Universal's estimates were so far off," a rival studio exec explains to me. So both
Cowboys and
Smurfs are looking around $13M for Friday. And we won't know who is truly No. 1 well into Saturday morning. Sony execs went to bed expecting
Smurfs to be #1 today with $13.5M which should translate into a "way overperforming' $37M. "That, plus a huge opening in Spain, makes for a pretty
Smurfy opening with worldwide prospects for France, Belgium, and Germany opening next week," a Sony exec gloated. Some rival studios are even predicting that
Cowboys could fall short with only mid-$30sM. "If we beat them or even are close Saturday, we've got them as our Sunday will definitely be better," said the Sony exec.
Smurfs beat
Cowboys on CinemaScores 'A' vs 'B'. The other major studio release was Warner Bros'
Crazy, Stupid, Love which received 'B+' and is looking around $20M for the weekend. Refined numbers and full analysis in the morning. Here's the
Top 10:
1.
Cowboys & Aliens (DreamWorks/Universal) NEW [3,750 Runs]
Friday $13M, Estimated Weekend $40M
This is well below the studio's own lowball projections of $45+M. (I've been saying for months this pic should have been done as a comedy!) Problem is that the budget has been pegged by insiders at $163M-$200M. That's partly because
Cowboys & Aliens endured a tortured 14-year development history involving more than a dozen writers. (Just five writers received screenplay credit after the Writers Guild not surprisingly held an arbitration trying to figure out who did what.) Yet another Hollywood case study of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Tracking had been lagging especially with women of all ages until last Thursday when it popped up. Good thing Universal is only on the hook for 25% financing and domestic-only distribution with DreamWorks taking 50% and Relativity Media 25%. Paramount is distributing foreign.
1.
The Smurfs - 3D (Sony) NEW [3,395 Runs]
Friday $13M, Estimated Weekend $40M
Sure, it's easy to look down your nose at
The Smurfs, but it was brought in and championed by no less than Sony Pictures Entertainment
Chairman Michael Lynton. And at Sony Animation, it was overseen by Bob Osher and Hannah Minghella (who is now president of production for Sony's Columbia Pictures).
3.
Captain America - 3D (Marvel/Disney/Paramount) Week 2 [3,715 Runs]
Friday $7.5M (-68%), Estimated Weekend $25M, Estimated Cume $110M
4.
Crazy, Stupid, Love (Warner Bros) NEW [3,020 Runs]
Friday $7M, Estimated Weekend $20M
5.
Harry Potter/Deathly Hallows Pt 2 - 3D (Warner Bros) Week 3 [4,145 Runs]
Friday $6.7M, Estimated Weekend $22M, Estimated Cume $318M
6.
Friends With Benefits (Screen Gems/Sony) Week 2 [2,926 Runs]
Friday $3.2M (-53%), Estimated Weekend $10M, Estimated Cume $39M
7.
Horrible Bosses (New Line/Warner Bros) Week 4 [2,510 Runs]
Friday $2.2M, Estimated Weekend $7M, Estimated Cume $96.2M
8.
Transformers 3 - 3D (Paramount) Week 5 [2,604 Runs[]
Friday $2M, Estimated Weekend $7M, Estimated Cume $339M
9.
Zookeeper (Sony) Week 4 [2,418 Runs]
Friday $1.3M, Estimated Weekend $4.3M, Estimated Cume $68.8M
10.
Cars 2 - 3D (Pixar/Disney) Week 6 [1,763 Runs]
Friday $750K, Estimated Weekend $2.5M, Estimated Cume $182M