User blog:Ceauntay/The Weekend Warrior: July 15 - 17, 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.

Predictions and Comparisons -

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (Warner Bros.) - $138.6 million N/A

2. Jane Hoop Elementary: The Final Rush Part 2 (Paramount) - $60 million -58%

3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Paramount) - $21.5 million -55%

4. Horrible Bosses (New Line/WB) - $16.4 million -42%

5. Zookeeper (Sony) - $10.5 million -48%

6. Winnie the Pooh (Walt Disney Pictures) - $8.0 million N/A

7. Cars 2 (Disney/Pixar) - $7.5 million -51%

8. Bad Teacher (Sony) - $5.0 million -47% 9. Larry Crowne (Universal) - $3.5 million -45%

10. Super 8 (Paramount) - $2.9 million -40%

10. Monte Carlo (20th Century Fox) - $1.8 million -54%

Weekend Overview

Anyone who thought that we've already seen the summer's biggest movies going by already with Transformers, Pirates or Hangovers, clearly doesn't realize the amount of anticipation that has been building for the last chapter in the ten-year film franchise that started way back in 2001 and has grossed $2 billion domestically and $6.4 billion worldwide.

Many backseat prognosticators have been hailing that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (Warner Bros.) might beat The Dark Knight's opening weekend record because it adds the higher ticket prices for IMAX and 3D, as well as opening during the summer, but there is definitely a limited audience for the movie which is basically the same people who have seen the previous seven movies, not an audience that has grown progressively with each movie like most franchises. Because of this, we expect it to make a play for the opening day record on Friday (including Thursday midnights) but be frontloaded enough that it ends up falling down to a level closer to what Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest opened to five years ago. Even so, it will be the biggest opening this year, and it should go onto be the highest grossing movie as well.

The clear underdog for the weekend is the attempt to bring Winnie the Pooh (Walt Disney Pictures) back to theaters, based on the fact that parents with kids under 8 or 9 years old won't want to scare them with the dark action of the weekend's other alternative. The old-fashioned 2D animated movie will try to entice parents with the nostalgia factor and the short running time will mean that theaters can get a lot of showings from each print, but it's still fighting against the fact that Winnie the Pooh has resided more on DVD than in theaters.

This week's "Chosen One" is Errol Morris' latest doc Tabloid (Sundance Selects), which tells the story of Joyce McKinney, who became the belle of British tabloids after kidnapping a mormon man she was in love with. You can read about that film below.

This weekend last year saw the release of Christopher Nolan's groundbreaking Inception (Warner Bros.) with a solid $63 million opening that didn't really prepare anyone for it to go onto become one of the summer's biggest hits with close to $300 million. Dropping to second place, Universal's hit animated comedy Despicable Me brought in $33 million to bring its total to $118 million. You have to feel kind of bad for Nicolas Cage's The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Walt Disney Pictures), which reteamed him with Jerry Bruckheimer and Jon Turteltaub from National Treasure. It opened on Wednesday and was able to make $7 million before the weekend where it had to settle for third place with a pitiful $17.6 million. The Top 10 grossed $169.2 million but since we expect "Harry Potter" to do 82% of that amount on its own, we should see another weekend up from last year.