Rio 2 Expected to Overtake Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the U.S. Box Office

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

's great word-of-mouth and reviews won't help it against the animated onslaught of Blue Sky's Rio 2, according to box office projections at Deadline. But it will be close, and between Captain America's great reviews and some pretty awful ones for Rio 2, it wouldn't be surprising to see it go the other way. The animated sequel is expected to make between $40 million and $42 million, while the second weekend of Captain America: The Winter Soldier should make the mid-to-high $30 millions. Deadline notes that Captain America grossed $95 million with $10.2 million coming from Thursday last weekend, so if it holds at 50%, it will gross $42.4 million. Captain America: The First Avenger dropped 61% in its second weekend, while first Thor dropped only 47% and its sequel Thor: The Dark World dropped 57%. The first Iron Man dropped only 48.1%, but subsequent sequels dropped 59.4% and 58.4%, respectively. That seemingly puts Cap on track to drop between 55% and 60% this weekend, based on existing trends alone, but those numbers could be misleading; some of those films came out at a more blockbuster-friendly time of year and opened significantly higher than The Winter Soldier, making a significant drop week-to-seek seemingly inevitable. Divergent, Noah and either Oculus or Draft Day are expected to round out the weekend's top five, but it's hard to say in what order considering that all of them are tracking between $10 million and $15 million and the two new releases could be impacted by word of mouth or even just a solid performance on Friday. If Captain America: The Winter Soldier fails to capture the #1 spot, it will be the third consecutive week a major studio tentpole has failed to hold the lead its second week in release (after Divergent and then Noah).