LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Box-office grosses will start to fade this weekend as needs as a summer tangent.
The comparable period from 2007 rung up less than $109 meg, the second-smallest tally of the ticket office season. A similarly underwhelming industry performance is likely this weekend, even with four new titles striking the market place in wide of the mark release.
Still, one of the market entrants is well positioned to capture the flag of the summer's penultimate ticket booth session, thanks to relatively weak competition from new releases and holdovers alike. "Death Race," Universal's remaking of the 1975 thriller "Death Race 2000," will try to go for the gold -- supported primarily by young male moviegoers -- with a bow in the mid to high-teen millions.
DreamWorks/Paramount's R-rated comedy "Tropic Thunder" could drop as much as 50 percent or so from its chart-topping opening session. That could discover it winning less than $13 one thousand thousand this weekend while motionless potentially competing for second place.
But Sony's PG-13 comedy "The House Bunny," star Anna Faris ("Scary Movie"), also looks likely for the low-teen millions and could outpace "Tropic" if its grosses climb into the midteens, mostly on interest from young females.
Warner Bros.' box office behemoth "The Dark Knight" likely testament finish third gear or fourth during its sixth frame of reference, with $10 million or so. But two extra wide openers look improbable to pass water it extinct of the single-digit millions.
Rated PG, the Ice Cube/Keke Palmer-starring "The Longshots" -- a family football tarradiddle from MGM and Dimension directed by rocker-turned-helmer Fred Durst -- hasn't shown much strong suit in prerelease tracking. But the topliner usually can buoy deliver at least middle-single-digit millions from his core fan base alone, so a late surge of interest in the moving picture could control it climb up just a bit higher during its opening frame.
Fox's PG-13 comedy "The Rocker" might want five days to hand a similar range. Having earned some positive early buzz, the Rainn Wilson-starring comedy unspooled Wednesday to stimulate additional word-of-mouth, simply its first-day tally was just $600,000.�
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