User blog:Ceauntay/The Weekend Warrior (Lite): April 29 - May 1, 2011

Greetings and welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly guide to the weekend's new movies. Tune in every Tuesday for the latest look at the upcoming weekend, and then check back on Thursday night for final projections based on actual theatre counts.

If you aren't doing so already, you can follow The Weekend Warrior on Twitter where he talks about box office, movies, music, comic books and all sorts of random things.

Updated Predictions and Comparisons -

1. Fast Five (Universal) - $75.2 million N/A (up 3.2 million)

2. Rio (20th Century Fox) - $16.5 million -37% (down .1 million)

3. Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family (Lionsgate) - $11.5 million -55% (same) 4. Water for Elephants (20th Century Fox) - $10.0 million -42% (same)

5. Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (The Weinstein Co.) - $9.2 million N/A (same)

6. Prom (Walt Disney) - $8 million N/A (same)

7. Hop (Universal) - $6.2 million -51% (same)

8. Scooby-Doo! The Movie (Warner Bros.) - $4.1 million - 54% (same)

9. African Cats (Disneynature) - $4.0 million -33% (same)

10. Soul Surfer (Film District) - $3.5 million -35% (same)

11. Insidious (Film District) - $3.2 million -38% (down .1 million)

-- Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (Freestyle Releasing) - $1.8 million N/A (down .5 million)

Weekend Overview

It's the last weekend of April and depending whom you ask, it's the either the last weekend of the spring movie season or the first weekend of the summer, and unfortunately, we're so busy at this year's Tribeca Film Festival that we have to do another stripped-down column this week. We have a full analysis of the big movie but don't have much to say about the others anyway.

The top movie of the weekend is about as easy as you can get with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker returning for Fast Five (Universal), joined by Dwayne Johnson and Tyrese Gibson, and it should be the movie that FINALLY breaks the year's rather dismal box office showing and opens with more than $40 million. If not, then we're quite doomed going into the summer. The previous movie opened with over $70 million in early April and this one is opening in IMAX theaters so even if the downturn of the box office this year affects the fifth installment, that should help it at least do in the $60 million range before summer starts proper next week.

Two movies that will try to bring in very specific younger audiences are the animated sequel Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (The Weinstein Co.) and Walt Disney Studios' Prom, but we think both probably won't get much further than the $10 million mark. The former is a sequel to the Weinstein Company's hit animated movie with Hayden Panettiere taking over the role voiced by Anne Hathaway in the original, and though the long delays of the sequel's release will surely hurt it, there should be enough families looking for something new to see after taking the kids to see Hop and Rio that it shouldn't bomb too badly. On the other hand, the latter is hoping to entice teens, mostly females, who are busy preparing for their own prom. The film stars Aimee Teegarden and Thomas McDonnell, the former as a prom queen who finds herself attracted to the latter's bad boy. We know next to nothing about this movie and having seen no commercials, we have no idea why female teens might be interested in this at all, so we think this will be lucky to make $8 million and could end up making even less.

You can read comparisons for these two movies here.

Lastly, there's an independently-made action-horror movie starring Brandon "Superman Returns" Routh as Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (Freestyle Releasing), a movie based on a little known foreign comic that's been finished for years and is now being self-released into nearly 1,000 theaters. Considering that the audience for this is more likely to want to see Fast Five, this one probably won't be getting too much attention and is likely to end up outside the Top 10 for the weekend.

This week's "Chosen One" is Takashi Miike's samurai flick 13 Assassins (Magnet), which you can read more about below. Last April wrapped up with the release of New Line and Platinum Dunes' remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (New Line/WB) starring Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, which opened at #1 with just under $33 million. Offered as counter programming was the Brendan Fraser family comedy Furry Vengeance (Summit Entertainment) which tanked with just $6.6 million in nearly 3,000 theaters, averaging just 2,200 per venue, which is territory where a number of this week's movies should find itself. The Top 10 grossed roughly $88 million and Fast Five should help this be another weekend where the box office is up from last year. Yay!