User blog:Ceauntay/The Weekend Warrior: September 2 - 4, 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 -

(Note: all of the below are four-day projections)

1. A BFF With Ghost Imagination 2 - $16.2 million -61%

2. Apollo 18 (Dimension Films) - $15.8 million N/A

3. The Help (DreamWorks) - $14.0 million -3%

4. Shark Night 3D (Relativity Media) - $12.5 million N/A

5. Colombiana (Sony/Tristar) - 6.8 million -36%

6. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox) - $6.5 million -25%

7. The Debt (Focus Features) - $6.0 million N/A

8. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (FilmDistrict) - $5.4 million -37%

9. Our Idiot Brother (The Weinstein Company) - $5.0 million -29%

10. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (Dimension Films) - $4.5 million -25%

Weekend Overview

It's Labor Day weekend and after two absolutely awful weekends, including one where most of the Eastern seaboard was plagued by Hurricane Irene, the summer officially comes to an end with a four-day weekend that's often been a time when studios offer up horror and action movies in order to give high school and college age kids a chance for one last blast before returning to school. How fortuitous is it that we have two PG-13 horror movies this weekend to give them choices after ignoring most of the R-rated movies released over the last month?

Not a lot is known about the outer space sci-fi thriller Apollo 18 (Dimension Films/Weinstein Company) which uses a similar found footage approach to horror as the blockbuster "Paranormal Activity" movies. It's being marketed in a similar fashion as other found footage movies under the pretense that it's real with commercials filled with scares, but it seems like the type of movie that would skew older and more male than some of the other offerings, and fortunately, they're the moviegoers not likely to be going away for the Labor Day weekend.

Unfortunately, it has some potentially serious horror competition for the younger folks with the shark attack thriller Shark Night 3D (Relativity Media), directed by Snakes on a Plane helmer David R. Ellis, another PG-13 movie that will try to show that it can deliver scares without the blood and gore that normally comes with shark movies. It's certainly a more appropriate way to end the summer than the space thriller and 3D ticket prices certainly could help, although this may look too cheesy to be taken seriously, which means more people might wait to see it on video after the fact.

Opening on Wednesday is a bit of prestige counter-programming for older moviegoers as Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain star in John Madden's political thriller The Debt (Focus Features), which has been delayed for at least a year following the dissolution of Miramax. Like One Day, this seems like the type of movie that would be better to platform and build an audience, especially due to it being a period piece about Nazi hunting, not exactly the easiest sell. Reviews should be good, which should allow it to have an opening that isn't too embarrassing for Focus, although it's likely to end up outside the Top 5.

If you don't like any of those choices, Gavin O'Connor's sports drama Warrior, starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, will get nationwide sneak previews over the weekend so check your local theaters if you want to see it early.

This week's "Chosen One" is the R-rated ensemble comedy A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (Samuel Goldwyn Films) starring Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte, Leslie Bibb and more, which you can read more about it below.

Last year Labor Day saw a #1 movie that surprised many as George Clooney's thriller The American (Focus Features) opened with just $3.2 million on Wednesday and Thursday, but then topped the box office with $16.7 million over the four-day weekend. Robert Rodriguez's action movie Machete (20th Century Fox), starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez and Robert De Niro took second with $14.1 million, and Drew Barrymore and Justin Long starred in the R-rated romantic comedy Going the Distance (New Line/WB), which tanked with just $8.5 million for fifth place. The Top 10 grossed $93.4 million over the four-day weekend, although we don't think this weekend will rebound enough to top that amount.