Generally in this column, I estimate what each film will collect at the box office during the Popcorn Period* for the purpose of trading on the Cantor Exchange, but I won’t be doing that today. The Exchange was open for mock trading but the practice session has now ended. Due to compliance reasons I won’t go into here, Cantor Exchange will be closed until April 22^nd when real trading begins. That’s right, one month from now you will be able to trade movie futures contracts for real. Remember, your friendly neighborhood box office analyst is always here at FilmGo offering trading tips, so come back often for all of my box office predictions. Trading during the practice period was incredibly fun and I did really well. Over the six months that I traded I was up 150%. I turned $10,000 virtual dollars into $25,000 virtual dollars. I’ll be posting a look at my portfolio up until the last day of the practice trading so that you can look at it. It will show all the positions I held when the Exchange stopped trading and my gain/loss history from October 1^st 2009 when I began.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid opened much better than I expected with $22.1M. This was much higher than my $14M prediction. I seriously underestimated the strength of the brand. The film will be in for major competition next weekend with Dragon opening but should continue to do well over the next few weeks with kid’s home from school for spring vacation.

The Bounty Hunter starring Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston posted solid numbers, collecting $20.7M. This was right on target with my $22M forecast. The film didn’t receive many high marks from critics but audiences didn’t seem to care. In fact the film performed very much like director Andy Tenant’s last picture, critically panned Fool’s Gold ($21.6M) starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. That film went on to make about $70M and Hunter should come close to achieving those heights.

I knew Repo Men was going to be a big bomb but it even managed to perform worse than I thought it would. The film earned a paltry $6.1M lower than my already low prediction of $7M. The film will be all but forgotten next weekend. This marks two box office bombs in a row for star Forest Whitaker whose Our Family Wedding opened to poor results just last week. 

Alice in Wonderland continued its reign as the #1 film in the country, snapping up another $34.2M bringing its total to $265.4M after only three weeks. This was very close to my $36.4M prediction. Alice is in for a steep decline this weekend because it is going to lose a great deal of its 3-D screenings to How to Train Your Dragon.

To see how the rest of the top 10 shaped up and how my other predictions for the weekend fared, check out the chart below.

Be sure to come back Thursday for my predictions for this weekend’s new releases How to Train Your Dragon and Hot Tub Time Machine.

Follow me on Twitter for box office updates throughout the week.

 

*The Popcorn Period – The settlement date for all movie contracts takes place approximately four weeks after a film has been released in theatres. It is during these 4 weeks that a film will collect money at the box office. If a film makes $50M at the box office during these 4 weeks, the contract will cash out at $50. I refer to this time frame as the Popcorn Period.