Weekend Forecast: ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ & ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’

This Memorial Day holiday weekend two new wide releases will arrive and should easily provide a one-two punch to the holdovers and dominate the box office.  Fox’s X-Men: Apocalypse will mark the third outing for the retooled franchise and should continue the strong run of comic book adaptations in 2016 by leading the box office, marking the eighth weekend out of 22 on the year which the genre has come out on top.

Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass sports an all-star cast and will be hoping to extend the Mouse House’s very strong 2016 returns. While it will have a hard time challenging Apocalypse’s reign for the overall crown, we are predicting that it will be a strong second place finisher, allowing the rare feat of two $50 million+ openers on the same weekend.

X-Men: Apocalypse

PROS:

• X-Men is a storied franchise with a massive existing fanbase, plus almost $4 billion in worldwide earnings — making it one of the most successful film franchises ever.
• The last film in the X-Men universe was February’s Deadpool, which proved to be the highest opening and overall grossing film so far.
• It has been tracking ~50%+ ahead of Days Of Future Past for the majority of its Twitter history as well as posting strong Facebook gains despite its massive ‘like’ base of over 14 million fans.
• As usual, Fox has done a stellar job marketing the film, especially via social media with a steady blitz of material being offered up over the past 8+ weeks.

CONS:

• Reviews have been very mixed, with its ~56% Rotten Tomatoes score being higher than only X-Men Origins: Wolverine among the nine released films in the franchise.
• Moviegoers might be beginning to suffer from too much X-Men (and/or comic book adaptations in general) with this being the fourth major release in the genre so far this year.
• The series is coming off of Days Of Future Past, which is widely regarded as one of the best comic storylines of all time. That’s a hard act to follow, especially when the villain here (and storyline) might not be as easily accessible to non-fans of the franchise.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

PROS:

• Alice In Wonderland grossed over $116 million back in 2010 on its opening weekend, demonstrating the power of not only the original story with moviegoers but also Tim Burton’s vision of it. Though Burton is not returning, this sequel attempts to go back to the well and provide a similar experience in hopes of tapping back into that massive demographic.
• Johnny Depp has proven to be a massive success in the family friendly demographic time and time again throughout the years.
• Disney is on a roll in 2016 with Zootopia, Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War all on course for $1 billion+ worldwide.

CONS:

• Social media buzz simply hasn’t been there for the most part with muted reception on both Twitter and Facebook.
• With six years having passed since the original film, it doesn’t have the same type of momentum or appeal it seems.
• The Lewis Carroll novel it is based on is not nearly as celebrated or recognized as the first.
• Reviews have been a mixed bag with its 45% fresh (and falling) rating coming in below the 52% the original managed.

Top 10 Forecast

Boxoffice forecasts this weekend’s top ten films will generate around $222.7 million over the four-day holiday frame. That would mark a 22 percent increase from Memorial Weekend last year which fell one week earlier on the calendar) when Tomorrowland and Poltergeist opened to underwhelming results as part of a $182.9 million four-day market haul.

Check out our complete 4-day weekend forecast below.

Shawn Robbins, Jesse Rifkin and Alex Edghill contributed to this report.