Wolverine Week: First Summer Blockbuster Should Smash the Box Office

With the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine tomorrow, the beginning of summer movies has finally arrived. From this weekend until about the middle of summer moviegoers will be given week after week of blockbuster films featuring big stars, special effects, and huge budgets. Movie studios know that these movies they release during this period are what make them their money. Look at last year for example. The Dark Knight was released in July and is now the second highest grossing movie of all time, second only to Titanic. The last several months have seen some big box office numbers. Monsters VS. Aliens and Fast and Furious opened with over $50 million on opening weekend. Those are big numbers for the spring time, but they are nothing compared to what we are about to experience. Continue reading for our box office prediction for X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Just how big will the first blockbuster of summer really be? The first movie of the season is usually highly anticipated and very rarely has any competetion. Look at last year when Iron Man debuted this same weekend. This movie was not a sequel, not a spin-off, and most people were unsure how exactly it would fare. After a $98 million opening weekend, jaws were dropped, a sequel was in development, and summer had it’s first blockbuster hit.

So what can Wolverine bring in this weekend? Let’s look at some of the obvious factors involved here: First off, this is the first big summer movie, secondly, this is a spin-off of the hugely successful X-Men franchise, and third, besides Swine-Flu and Pirates, this movie has been heavily publicized over the news for weeks now. We all know of the leak which occurred earlier this month where someone at Fox released a work print version of the film which I am sure many of you know about or have possibly seen. The studio went into damage control mode, and to make sure they can drive audiences to the theaters, they are placing alternate endings, after the credits, on different prints of the movie. This seems like a desperate attempt to bring in an audience,which, in my opinion, is completely unnecessary.

This movie is going to have a huge opening weekend. I don’t know how much it will make in it’s entire run because it will face serious competition from next week’s Star Trek. So it really has one weekend all to it’s self – so it better be big, it has to be big. I have heard different estimates from many different sources. The predictions range from the low $70 million to the high $90 million mark. I think many people are pessimistic about this movies success because of the leak for the film. Those who have seen the movie will still go watch it in the theater.

Before I make my prediction let’s look at how the first three X-Men movies stacked up. The first X-Men opened with a $54.5 million weekend. X-2: X-Men United opened with $85.5 million, and the third movie in the trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand hit $102 million in it’s opening weekend. So where will this Wolverine spin-off land? I would say somewhere between X-2 and The Last Stand. I don’t think it will have quite the opening that Iron Man had last year at this time, but it will definitely come close.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine Opening Weekend Prediction: $90 million.