Legend of Tarzan Box Office Results: $8.5M Friday, Projects to $23M thru Sunday

ERBDOM

UPDATE 2:30 PM FRIDAY.  This from Deadline Hollywood — first projections based on matinees back east.  Think of this as exit poll numbers.

Disney/Pixar’s Finding Dory is ruling No. 1 with an estimated $42M three-day and $52M four-day at 4,305. The sequel entered the weekend with $330.3M and is set to bank $13M today. That easily puts it past Minions ($336M), and by Monday, Dory will have beaten Despicable Me 2’s stateside take of $368M.

Disney/Walden Media’s Steven Spielberg movie The BFG and Warner Bros./Village Roadshow’s The Legend of Tarzan are wrestling for third. At 3,357 theaters,  BFG is looking at an estimated $8M today, Friday-Sunday take of $23M and a four-day of $28M. Tarzan at 3,561 is on track to make $8.5M today, $23M over Friday-Sunday and $27.5M by Monday.

UPDATE NOON FRIDAY:  Interesting comment from Deadline Hollywood:

 BFG has the best reviews of this weekend’s new titles with 73% fresh, while Legend of Tarzan is at 34% rotten. Despite that rip in Tarzan’s loincloth, general buzz around town is that the David Yates movie is pretty good. It wouldn’t be surprising to see another scenario this weekend where the audience reaction outshines critics’ poor word of mouth.

ORIGINAL POST 8AM FRIDAY:  The word is in.  Thursday night previews netted $2.25M for Tarzan, while Spielberg’s The BFG pulled in only $775,000.  Meanwhile Purge: Election Year pulled in $3.65M, winning the night and signaling that it will probably win the weekend if audiences like it.  But “winning the weekend” is not really the measure of success or failure.

What does this project out to for Legend of Tarzan?

I’m not going there just yet.   I will say that my nightmare was that LOT would pull in less than $1m on Thursday night, and that didn’t happen.  It performed respectably and there is nothing in the Thursday night outcome that would imply it will do worse than Low $30M range.    But I’m trying to root it on to $40M, which is the “victory” threshhold, given the budget and P&A costs.

Meanwhile — here are some interesting datapoints from Rotten Tomatoes.

Independence Day Resurgence
32% Critics Rating with 34% Audience “Liked it” Rating

Legend of Tarzan
34% Critics Rating with 69% Audience “Liked it” Rating

Purge Election Year
57% Critics Raating with 73% Audience “Liked it” Rating

The obvious anomaly in that data set is that LOT has a bigger disconnect between critics and audiences than the other films — and it seems that LOT not getting a lot of love from the critics will not translate into bad audience ratings, whereas with IDR both critics and audiences didn’t like it.

Legend of Tarzan is also holding well at 7.3 audience rating on IMDB.
Purge is 6.7
IDR is 5.7