There will only be one winner at the box office this weekend, and it ain’t gonna be Dance Flick.
Terminator Salvation — made by Warner Bros. — comes onto the scene with a lot of good buzz and some great trailers. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian — made by Fox — is the sequel to a wildly ultra-successful family adventure extravaganza.
Warner Bros. and Fox are mortal enemies this year thanks to that whole Watchmen lawsuit. And since Watchmen underperformed, both of them are still pretty sore about it. So “a fight to the death” is not necessarily an overexaggeration of the stakes this weekend.
Salvation has gotten a lot of surprisingly negative reviews, but at last night’s debut midnight showings it scored an estimated three million bucks. Battle of the Smithsonian’s title still is way too much of a mouthful — I had to look it up to make sure Night of the Museum, Battle at the Smithsonian, and Battle for the Smithsonian were all incorrect — and it might have fared better if it was released next month, when kids are safely out of school.
The box office predictors who are far smarter than I am are predicting a $90 million-ish five-day opening (today through Memorial Day) for Salvation and a $60 million-ish four-day weekend (tomorrow through Memorial Day) for Museum. So in other words, they both win big, but Salvation gets the bragging rights. Next week, we’ll see if that holds up.
Make sure to watch TEN clips of Terminator Salvation and one from Battle of the Smithsonian, hosted right here at Clevver.
Leave a Reply