Notable Openings This Weekend: The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Break out the 3D glasses and book those midnight screenings, Summer movie season has officially begun. That’s right, it’s time for critics to hide under their beds, and they sure didn’t waste any time this year. Right out of the gate, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has been blasted for all the elements critics detest this time of year — over bloated CG action, too many characters, shameless franchise building, yup, summer is definitely in the air. As this is the most lucrative movie weekend of the year, let’s spin some webs and dive right into it!
While I enjoyed 2012’s Spider-Man reboot immensely (mostly because the Sam Raimi films are the bane of my existence), fans were ‘meh’ on it to say the least. It looks like Sony has over reacted, as this version trades in the dark/serious tone for the Ronald McDonald funhouse that is Electro and bright lights. Yay. We’ll see how it goes, but as far as the box office is concerned, this should do very well. Despite the fact that it’s Spider-Man, I’ve never seen a film marketed harder than this one. It’s almost as if Spider-Man was actually swinging across your city with all his ads and billboards.
It’s important to note that The Amazing Spider-Man a couple years ago made significantly less money domestically than the original trilogy, not even getting to $300 Million. I think people are a little weary of the web crawler right now, relatively speaking. If this film is great though, and gets good word of mouth, it will be just fine. But if fans are iffy, Spider-Man’s box office will continue to drop much like the X-Men franchise did after the damage done by X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Don’t get me wrong, this thing will make a crap load of money, but if Sony wants this franchise to continue with spin-off films, this one’s really got to hit big.
How Will It All Break Down…
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 dominates, but I don’t think it quite gets to $100 Million opening weekend.
TOP 5 BOX OFFICE PREDICTIONS
1) The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — $97.5 Million
2) The Other Woman — $14 Million
3) Captain America: The Winter Soldier — $10.5 Million
4) Heaven is for Real — $8.5 Million
5) Rio 2 — $7.5 Million
