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FRIDAY PM: Lionsgate looks to celebrate this weekend with their first No. 1 opening since November 2023’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes with Den of Thieves 2: Pantera which is currently seeing a $14M+ opening with room for upside. You’ll remember the Santa Monica, CA-based studio wasn’t exactly jumping into piles of cash last year in a slate that was starving for tentpoles. Friday is $5.5M-$6.5M on Pantera. For Gerard Butler, it reps his first No. 1 opening since August 2019’s Angel Has Fallen ($21.3M). Lionsgate has PLF and motion seats on Den of Thieves 2.
We’ll know as the weekend plays out how bad LA is with around a dozen closures; in total about 84 including those impacted by winter conditions in Texas.
Lionsgate inherited Den of Thieves 2 via their acquisition of eOne (which owned Sierra/Affinity). Their exposure on the sequel after foreign sales is $15M with another mid $20M P&A being spent. The studios has made a reported business out of these meat and potatoes action dude movies with upside in the PVOD windows and beyond. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be releasing them. Early Screen Engine/Comscore PostTrak exits last night are at 72% positive, 3 1/2 stars with 64% men, 79% over 25.
Paramount’s wide break of Better Man is not looking sexy at $1M from 1,291 sites. The studio acquired the Michael Gracey directed movie for $25M including France and Japan territories.
Mufasa crossed the half billion mark at the global box office this AM. Moana 2 yesterday clocked $971.1M worldwide, overtaking Despicable Me 4 ($969.1M) as the No. 3 global release of 2024 and 13th highest grossing animated title of all-time.
Rest of the top 5 is as follows:
FRIDAY AM: Lionsgate’s Den of Thieves 2: Pantera made $1.35M yesterday from showtimes that began at 6PM, a figure that’s ahead of the $950K previews of the original 2018 movie by +42%, but under last year’s other guy meat and potatoes movie, The Beekeeper which did $2.4M in overall previews ($1.5M strictly in its Thursday) on its way to a $16.5M 3-day.
Previews for Den of Thieves 2 are also higher than that of Gerard Butler’s Plane back in January 2023 which did $625K on its way to $3.5M Friday and $10.2M 3-day.
Den of Thieves 2 is expected to open between $11M-$13M at 3,008 in what is a soft early January frame. Part of that has to do with the offerings here, however, business is certain to be slow in the No. 1 market of the country, LA, due to the wildfires. Of 14 cinemas that were closed, two reopened: The AMC Americana in Glendale and the AMC Topanga 12 in Canoga Park. Prime LA venues AMC Century City, AMC Burbank and AMC Grove remain open. Den of Thieves 2 could get beat by Mufasa or Sonic the Hedgehog 3 which are looking to do about the same.
The previous movie was released by STX when it was in its full glory. The sequel here with Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. returning as well as director Christian Gudegast, isn’t part of STX’s output deal with Lionsgate. Foreign sales for the sequel were announced at Cannes 2019 by Sierra/Affinity. Why a sequel? The first movie overperformed its single digit opening in January 2018 to $15.2M and wound up with $44.9M domestic and $80.5M worldwide.
Part two sees Big Nick (Butler) back on the hunt in Europe and closing in on Donnie (Jackson), who is embroiled in the treacherous and unpredictable world of diamond thieves and the infamous Panther mafia, as they plot a massive heist of the world’s largest diamond exchange. The movie was produced by Tucker Tooley, p.g.a., Gerard Butler, Alan Siegel, and Mark Canton.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond enjoyed the sequel, which is 70% fresh with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
Other offerings this weekend include the 1,200 theater expansion of Paramount’s biopic about pop star Robbie Williams, Better Man, which isn’t expected to do much in the single digits after an exclusive run that only put up an –eek–$3K to $4k theater average in its first two weekends.
