The last big movie of the month, Walt Disney Studios’ Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie, opened on Thursday night with previews that brought in $4.2 million and now we have estimates for Friday that shows the movie’s opening day to be around $24.2 million.
While this isn’t quite up to the $35 million plus openings we’ve been seeing over the past couple of months, it’s an impressive debut for a movie with a female lead and in fact, it’s well on its way to becoming Jolie’s highest opening weekend, having paved the way for the likes of Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games.
By comparison, that amount is slightly higher than Sam Raimi’s Oz The Great and Powerful when it opened in March 2013, and that went on to a $79 million opening weekend, although with many schools out, one would expect that the film’s younger demographic that’s already out of school would make this summer movie more frontloaded to Friday. Either way, while a $70 million plus opening weekend isn’t impossible, we think it will fall somewhere closer to $65 million for the weekend
