Friday Box Office Analysis
By Kim Hollis
August 18, 2018
BoxOfficeProphets.com

A lot crazy richer after this weekend!
August continues to cruise along with yet another breakout hit. In the process, the rom-com genre might even see some revitalization (though it's more likely that we'll see a bunch of copycats who miss the point entirely).

Crazy Rich Asians is our top film for Friday and will also be the #1 movie of the weekend. The adaptation of a popular novel earned a fabulous $7.3 million yesterday, adding to the $8.8 million it had already earned since Wednesday. The title of the film might work against it to some degree, but the stellar reviews (92 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) and word-of-mouth (Cinemascore grade of A) should certainly push it along to a nice, long run at the box office. It's the kind of movie that a lot of fans will enjoy watching a second time. For the three-day portion of the weekend, Crazy Rich Asians should come in with $22 million, which means it's going to have a five-day total of just over $30 million. By the way, that matches its budget, so this one is definitely going to be a moneymaker for Warner Bros.

That means The Meg will fall to second after a crazy rich debut of its own last weekend. A $5.8 million Friday total represents a 65% decline from the same day last week. Apparently, people who wanted to see a giant shark eating people got out to see the film last weekend. Anyway, let's call it a weekend total of $20.4 million. Really, though, we'll all be looking for its international numbers since they're the big story for this film.

Third and fourth place for Friday go to our other two brand new releases. The first of these is Mile 22, the Mark Wahlberg/Peter Berg film that just didn't appeal to many. $5.3 million on Friday isn't the end of the world considering the toxic reviews, but it's just not much of a debut to make it noteworthy. $14.3 million is just sort of "there" for a movie with a $35 million budget. It might earn back that budget, but profitability is not in the cards.

Finally, Alpha debuted yesterday with $3.4 million for the upstart distributor Studio 8. This one actually *did* have a pretty sizable budget given he subject matter/story - $65-80 million projected. Since Alpha will debut with a weekend total of just $9.1 million, it's got a long, long way to go before anyone can consider it to be anything other than a disappointment. It certainly has limited appeal - maybe families of tweens? I'm not even sure who really wants to see this.