Other Crap

The Weekend Warrior's box office predictions and analysis for this weekend

There's only one new movie this week, that Half-Baked Prince thingy, and there's no question it will be a barn-burner. The only sophistication involves estimating the precise height it will reach in its 4300 theaters. Warrior thinks it will be somewhere just south of $90m. If it does come in that low, it will rank 5th among the six Potter films. In order, they have opened with 90-88-93-102-77. Note that the last one, which opened at a mere 77, finished as the second highest overall, beating out the ones which opened at 102 and 93. The key factor there was a monstrous Wednesday opener which siphoned off the enthusiastic first-day fanatics from the weekend. That film already had $62m in the bank before the weekend started, so it was actually the top Potter film in the "first 5 days" category, and by a wide margin. Here are those stats in order: 104-98-109-119-139.

Potter 6 is a good bet to finish around $300m. The other five ended up grossing (in order): 318-262-250-290-292.