While it won’t be enough to take the box office crown this week, a closer look at the box office projections at Box Office Mojo suggests that Man of Steel will likely hold onto the #2 slot this weekend, beating out World War Z by a few million dollars.Monsters University is expected to debut at $73.9 million, according to the site. That’s on the low end, but remember that last week everyone was projecting Man of Steel to make between $80 and $100 million, while Box Office Mojo predicted it to break Toy Story 3‘s June record of $110 million and turned out to be right. If they expect a comparably soft weekend, it might be worth considering.There’s also the fact that Monsters University is a family film. While you might note that Toy Story 3 is also kids’ movie, it’s a slightly different animal, as it was the third (and marketed as maybe the final) installment in a popular franchise that had plenty of momentum. of Monsters University is a sequel twelve years in the making, so for its intended demographic of kids under 13, it’s basically a reboot.Why’s all of this relevant? Movies targeted at kids generally don’t perform at midnight screenings except in very special circumstances, of which Monsters University is not one. That means it has the potential to get off to a weak start on Friday compared to recent smashes like Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel.For what it’s worth–and Man of Steel indicates that’s very little–the film is doing comparably poorly with critics as compared to its predecessor. Monsters, Inc. scored a 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 84% of the audience liking it as well; Monsters University got only 77% from the critics. That’s barely better than World War Z‘s 70% and 77% on Thursday night was where Man of Steel started to set off some people’s alarms. There’s not a lot of precedent for this kind of dip in Pixar sequels; the Toy Story movies all score either 99% or 100% positive, while Cars 2 scored a “rotten” 38%…but even the first one of those was only 74% fresh.Man of Steel itself is expected to drop substantially, but not in a way that necessarily reflects badly on the film. With two new blockbusters opening this week–one aimed at the under-13 demographic and the other targeted at teens and adults–Man of Steel‘s projected 59% drop to $48 million is well within the range that studios will take. Iron Man 3 won its second weekend against weaker competition with a 58.4% drop.If the 59% drop holds worldwide, that should give the film a second weekend of just under $100 million, meaning that it would have cleared the $325 million mark by the end of the weekend. Given where it stands right now domestically–$161 million and change–just the projected U.S. weekend will be enough to clear the film’s reported production budget by Sunday (which doesn’t count international box office and things like $170 million in corporate sponsorship and tie-in deals).Any drop over 60%, though, could put the #2 spot in play for World War Z, which is doing surprisingly well among critics (70% at Rotten Tomatoes) in spite of the fact that the film–along with next month’s The Lone Ranger–has long been projected to be one of the summer’s big flops. World War Z is expected to open at $46 million, which is a pretty impressive bow but might still make it nearly impossible to make back its $190 million production budget with just domestic ticket sales–even if those sales include a select number of $50 MegaTickets that include 3-D glasses, a digital copy of the movie and other goodies. The film has been described as the most expensive zombie movie ever made, and coming at a time when fans can get good, free zombies all the time on cable it arguably faces an uphill battle trying to get its core audience to commit to a movie ticket.It’s also somewhat hampered by the fact that the film appears to be nothing at all like the wildly-successful novel it’s nominally based on, which potentially alienates away fans of the books and also baffles critics. The book was a genre-bending, cleverly-quirky endeavor, where the film seems to play the whole thing much more straight. Early cuts of the film reportedly took such a beating that the theatrical release was delayed for substantial reshoots.World War Z is a crapshoot, honestly; if word-of-mouth turns sour, the film could plummet and get nowhere near Man of Steel this weekend, guaranteeing that it would be a major flop for Paramount. If, on the other hand, word-of-mouth stays strong, it could potentially hit $50 million and/or take the #2 spot at the box office.
