There’s one major studio wide entry this weekend, Amazon MGM Studios‘ $60M dystopian-future thriller Mercy starring Chris Pratt, and while it did $1.5M in previews on Thursday, the entire three-day outlook could be impacted by the looming winter storm that’s hitting from Texas to New England. Currently, the Timur Bekmambetov-directed movie that also stars Rebecca Ferguson is looking at $12M-$15M domestic for a No. 1 win against the sixth weekend of 20th Century Studios’ Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is eying a 50% decline to around $7M as it’s losing the Imax and PLFs to Mercy.
Those preview figures for Mercy are higher than Greenland 2: Migration, which did $900K this month, and Jason Statham’s A Working Man, which did $1.1M last year.
Marco van Belle’s screenplay follows a detective (Pratt) who stands trial accused of murdering his wife. He has 90 minutes to prove his innocence to the advanced AI judge (voiced by Ferguson) he once championed, before it determines his fate.
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Mercy has an 83% offshore footprint this weekend, which began Wednesday in Belgium and Indonesia, with Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Germany and the Middle East opening Thursday. Friday brings the UK, Spain, Japan and China, with 80 territories overall. Comps for the Pratt movie are on par with other meat-and-potatoes action movies, i.e. A Working Man and Gerard Butler’s Den of Thieves: Pantera. A Working Man opened to $15.5M domestic and finaled at $37M stateside and $89.2M global off 47% Rotten Tomatoes critics and 87% audiences. Word from sources is that the No. 2-global-ranking pic is between Zootopia 2 and Mercy. These action movies tend to excel in Germany, Saudi Arabia, UAE, UK, Spain and Mexico.
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Also opening wide is Cineverse’s Return to Silent Hill, which is looking at low- to mid-single digits at 1,830 theaters. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes aren’t fans of either Mercy at 23% or Return to Silent Hill at 15%. The Christopher Gans-directed movie follows a man (Jeremy Irons) who receives a mysterious letter from his lost love. He’s drawn to Silent Hill, a once familiar town now consumed by darkness. The pic is loosely based on the 2001 Konami video game Silent Hill 2 and is the third installment in the Silent Hill film series. Sony opened the original Silent Hill to $20.1M in 2006. Open Road had the 2012 sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation, which debuted to $8M.
Focus Features Hamnet, in the wake of eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, is jumping from 718 theaters to 1,983. The Chloé Zhao-directed period pic is up to $15.6M domestic and well north of $13M abroad. Sources are expecting this Jesse Buckley-Paul Mescal movie to take off at the global box office.
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This weekend’s potentially historic storm in the U.S. is ramping up today in areas including Dallas and Oklahoma City. It’s expected to expand eastward by Saturday morning, with ice and freezing rain hitting Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. By later Saturday and into Sunday, the storm is forecast to affect the Mid-Atlantic states and hit the Northeast hard on Sunday afternoon and evening. Some 8-18 inches of snow is expected in such major metropolitan areas as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, in Park City, Utah, where the Sundance Film Festival is in the town’s final swing, the mountains are completely dry.
