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.
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