Mr. Peabody & Sherman Beats Need For Speed at the Box Office, Veronica Mars Cracks the Top Ten

It's shaping up to be an odd week at the domestic box office. Just yesterday, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Aaron Paul-starring video game adaptation Need for Speed would take the top spot, but yesterday's numbers tell a different story and it now looks like Mr. Peabody and Sherman, the Dreamworks Animation adaptation of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show characters, will be #1. That's good news for DreamWorks, which has had some flops in its animation department and needs Peabody and Sherman to be considered a success and are expecting to take a big write-down on the expensive animated feature (so much so, in fact, that it affected DreamWorks's stock price last week). It's looking like Peabody and Sherman will generate as much as $23 million and will likely be the only movie to generate more than $20 million, with Need for Speed taking the #2 spot with Just under $20 million. If it has a soft Sunday, though, Need for Speed can actually end up third, behind Sherman and last week's other big release, 300: Rise of an Empire, which is expected to take between $18 million and $19 million. Non-Stop and Tyler Perry's Single Moms Club will round out the week's top five, with both likely to make just short of $10 million. The latter is notable because Lionsgate just terminated their relationship with Perry's production shingle, and while they've got a couple of more movies in the pipeline with him, the reasoning that most pundits are giving is that he can't open big with a movie that doesn't have "Madea" in the title. The movie itself cost a little bit of nothing to make, but it opened on around 2,000 screens and so the expectation was likely that it would generate at least $10 million this weekend, which is likely out of its reach.

Lower down the list is where some really impressive per-screen averages come in. The Grand Budapest Hotel, opening in less than 100 theaters, is coming in at #8, with about $2.8 million. That number is a little wonky because, while it indicates a massive $50,000-plus per-screen average, it also represents a film that will open on a couple of thousand screens next week and has been getting a blockbuster-sized promotional push. Nevertheless, there's no arguing with the results and it's got the highest per-screen average of any movie on the list by far. Coming in second? The #9 movie, not the #1. Veronica Mars broke a number of records on its way to a $5 million-dollar-plus budget generated just from Kickstarter pledges last year -- and now it's looking ready to take one more. It seems as though Veronica Mars will be the first Kickstarter-backed film to break into the top ten films at the weekend box office, with a per-screen average of around $6,000 and a total haul of more than $2.5 million.

is also the first major-studio movie to release simultaneously in theaters (around 300 nationwide) and digitally, by way of keeping a promise to Kickstarter backers that they would have access to the movie the weekend of release. With revenue coming in from streaming rentals and purchases as well as the pre-ordered digital copies that were redeemed by Kickstarter backers, it will be difficult to gauge right away just how much Veronica Mars actually generates this weekend. Studios are more protective of home entertainment numbers, for a start, and there were some hiccups along the way for Veronica Mars. The digital copies were distributed via Flixster, a digital streaming and download service with whom Warner Bros. (the rightsholders and production/distribution studio) has a relationship. A number of fans complained, since no provider had been specified on Kickstarter and they had hoped for a code that could be redeemed at the retailer of their choice. Ultimately director Rob Thomas made an arrangement with Warner Digital that fans who absolutely could not make Flixster work to their satisfaction could contact his fulfillment people for a refund or a credit to get the movie on another service such as Amazon or iTunes. All of this will mean that it will likely be a while before even Warner Bros. knows exactly what the film generated this weekend. That might not matter at all, though, because everyone involved had language in their deals to make a sequel possible, according to this week's PaleyFest reunion panel -- and while there's been no specific discussion of what "magic number" might make Warner Bros. decide that a sequel is merited, rumor has it that number isn't particularly high and by the sound of things might be exceeded in the first week of release. Rounding out the top ten for the week, funny enough? 2013's second-highest-grossing film, Frozen -- starring Kristen "Veronica Mars herself" Bell.