Notable Openings This Weekend: If I Stay, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, When the Game Stands Tall
Will Ninja Turtles yet again reign supreme due to lack of competition? Actually, it looks like Guardians of the Galaxy could “Rocket” its way back to the top. I feel like I’ve been talking about Guardians of the Galaxy and Ninja Turtles competing against each other for three months. The Expendables certainly failed to overtake them, and it looks like the best hope for a new #1 is another foray into young adult novel land. While the Guardians/Turtles battle is probably the most interesting storyline of the weekend, there are three new films to talk about, including a return to Sin City, only a mere nine years later.
Let’s start with that. Nine years. Are you kidding me with this? Look, the original Sin City was a nice little surprise, but it’s not like it broke the bank vaults open. It didn’t even get to $100 Million domestically. If you were going to make a Sin City sequel, you needed to make it two days after the original, while it was still fresh in people’s minds. While it has some solid names like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin, this is only going to play to the Comic-Con crowd. Sin City won’t bomb, but this might be the only week we see it in the top five.
The movie with the best chance of dethroning Turtles or Guardians is If I Stay. Not that Chloe Moretz is a big star or anything, but it’s a sappy young adult adaptation that plays to the teenage girl crowd. As we’ve seen recently, those films are more than capable of raking in the dough. Besides, that audience hasn’t exactly had a lot of movies marketed towards them this summer.
I go to a lot of movies, and I haven’t seen one trailer for When the Game Stands Tall, so clearly this is just getting dumped out. Sports movies are definitely capable of bringing in money, but with Draft Day, Million Dollar Arm, and now this weekend’s When the Game Stands Tall, can we stop with these rinky-dink “based on a true story that only three people have heard of” sports movies? They don’t make money, and nobody cares. When it comes to sports, stick to comedies, or stories that people have actually heard of, like Miracle and Moneyball. Sorry for the rant, but there are MUCH better sports stories to be told.
How Will It All Break Down…
The teenage girls will get the victory with If I Stay, but Guardians will overtake Turtles. When the Game Stands Tall doesn’t make the top five.
TOP 5 BOX OFFICE PREDICTIONS
1) If I Stay — $19 Million
2) Guardians of the Galaxy — $15 Million
3) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — $14.5 Million
4) Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – $14 Million
5) Let’s Be Cops — $8.5 Million
