Opening in a week, Warner Bros.’s Man of Steel‘s box office projections have been all over the place since the beginning of the year, when people started predicting such things.One box office expert back in March predicted that it wouldn’t crack the top five for the year–but that same person predicted that The Hangover Part III would be a huge hit and that Fast & Furious 6 wouldn’t. Hitfix has Man of Steel pegged for the year’s #2 spot, but with a $300 million domestic gross. They also predicted that Iron Man 3 would bring home $350 million at #1 – which is about $35 million short of what it has already done, with probably another month (of admittedly modest returns) to get it up over $400 million or so. BoxOffice.com removes its projections after the movies debut, so we don’t know what they predicted for Iron Man 3, but they’ve got Man of Steel pegged to open at just over $110 million and wind up with about $340, which doesn’t sound too unreasonable (although we expect a bigger opening weekend than that).Man of Steel might have more staying power than Iron Man 3, if word-of-mouth stays strong and the hardcore fans go back for more. Iron Man 3 had strong competition among adults every week after its release, whereas Man of Steel will face World War Z, but that’s hardly expected to blow anyone out of the water (Monsters University will likely be a dominant force at the box office, but it doesn’t have the same target audience). While “staying power” might not lift Superman past Iron Man, what it might do is make the film dominant over a longer time, giving it a chance to nose its way toward the top of the list of June openers.
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