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Weekend Box Office Forecasts ‘Deadpool’ Smashing ‘Zoolander 2’

By Nick Younker
Published on: 03:05 PST, Feb 12, 2016

Box office results for this weekend will likely show that Deadpool is going to be make an example out of Zoolander 2 over Valentine’s Day and President’s Day weekend. But that does not mean the box office is going to fill up to the max, given the weather that is about to come in.

Suffice it to say that in the Information Age and the era of the social media boom, there is so much hype for Deadpool across the major platforms that it is fairly easy these days to measure out a box office estimate without being an industry professional. For those who study the overall performance for movies of the past, you can easily come up with their your own predictions for what your favorite movies are going to make at the box office.

An article by Entertainment Weekly suggests some conservative estimates for the movies opening up this weekend, which is a four-day weekend as opposed to the standard three-day weekends that most movies get measured up to.

They have the official box office haul for Deadpool coming in at $65 million for the four-day event. Although that is good for an R-rated movie, that is fairly weak for a Marvel comic book adaptation. There are a few other Marvel movies that have opened weak like that, but they also did not quite get all the hype that has been generated via social media, which includes the most talked-about movie and most-shared trailers, etc.

Considering this is a four-day weekend, it is more likely that the film will fall just north of $70 million with a strong holdover on the weekdays next week, leading into another strong weekend box office.

EW has also guessed that Zoolander 2 would land somewhere around $25 million at the box office. That number sounds about right, but fans should not be surprised if it falls just short of it. Although there are a few Ben Stiller fans out there that will watch about any of his movies, the cult is not quite big enough for the film to generate much more than that. To put it into perspective, the first film only pulled in about $15 million at the box office, and that was 15 years ago.

Movie fans should also note that last year about this time, the movie to run out and watch was Fifty Shades of Grey. It pulled in an estimated $93 million for the four-day weekend, according to Box Office Mojo.

That broke box office records for the annual weekend event, but that does not quite mean that the movie was a full on success. It might have pulled a strong opening weekend for the freshman franchise, and it even had tons of hype on social media, which could have put it over the top for a strong opening. But the results on the backend left it with $166 million total for the entire box office run of the film at theaters. That basically means that the opening weekend accounted for over 50 percent of its total domestic gross. Not many films are considered successful with that stigma attached to them.

Fast-forward to this weekend, and the box office has another big challenger that will affect all movies and their share of the total weekend haul. The weather is about to pull another return of the dreaded “Polar Vortex.”

NBC News is reporting that the rare temperature system will bring its own mix of ice and snow that will likely break records for the Valentine’s Day weekend with lows in the sub-zero range across the Northeast. Boston and Hartford might be in some real danger with lows around -2 and -9, respectively.

This could have potentially devastating effects on the box office this weekend, given that the area is so populated with a lion’s share of the domestic audience living in the region. If it is so bad that people cannot get out to theaters, then all of the above box office estimates will be drastically changed for the films’ opening weekend.

[Image via 20th Century Fox]

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