'Secret Life of Pets 2' and 'Dark Phoenix' Look to Lead Weekend Box Office

The 2019 yearly box office continues to improve, currently closing the year-to-year gap to a -7.5% difference after a strong week that began with Godzilla: King of the Monsters topping the weekend box office, but it has been Disney's Aladdin that is making the most waves lately, surpassing $500 million globally today while moving ahead of Godzilla as the week's top performing title. This weekend will continue the trend with a top twelve that should threaten a combined $175 million, well ahead of the same weekend last year, led by new releases in Universal's The Secret Life of Pets 2 and Fox's final chapter in their X-Men franchise, Dark Phoenix.

At the top of this weekend's box office look for Universal's latest animated collaboration with Illumination, The Secret Life of Pets 2, to deliver a $50+ million performance, which is well behind the $104 million debut for the original. As we've been seeing these past couple of weekends it's a very crowded marketplace and with Disney's Aladdin still playing well, it creates some real competition when it comes to family features.

A look at IMDb page view data shows Pets 2 pacing severely behind the original over the two weeks leading up to release as well as pacing behind the likes of Monsters University, How To Train Your Dragon 2, Cars 3 and Despicable Me 3. The best comp when it comes to IMDb page view performance is currently The LEGO Movie 2, which opened with $34 million this past February. Also not helping matters are reviews, which have been mixed-to-negative coming in with a score of 53 on Metacritic and 57% on RottenTomatoes. Overall, we're going with a $51 million forecast from 4,561 locations, but that's mostly based on the massive success of the first film or we might otherwise be looking at a sub-$50 million start.

Internationally, Pets 2 has already delivered over $34 million from 12 markets so far and it will open in an additional 17 this weekend.

Disney's release of Fox's final X-Men film, Dark Phoenix is finally hitting theaters after originally being slated for a November 2018 release. The film will debut in over 3,700 locations and while the studio is anticipating a debut in the $40-50 million range that is looking like it could be a tough range to hit. Reviews for the film are terrible, coming in at 23% on RottenTomatoes, ranking as the worst in the X-Men franchise on the aggregation site.

A look at IMDb page view performance is equally depressing, showing the film pacing well behind the likes of X-Men: Apocalypse and even 2017's The Mummy, which itself disappointed with a $31.6 million opening after dreadful reviews. The best comparison when looking at IMDb's page view data is actually 2016's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which Dark Phoenix is out-pacing over the two weeks leading up to release, but that film's $35 million debut is hardly impressive.

Internationally, Dark Phoenix debuts day and date in all major territories except for Indonesia (Jun 14) and Japan (Jun 21).

As mentioned in our lede, Disney's Aladdin will top $500 million globally today, surpassing the lifetime global cume of Oz: The Great and Powerful ($493m) as well as the lifetime domestic cume of Cinderella ($201m) after surpassing the $200 million mark yesterday. This weekend we're looking for a dip around -43% or so for a three-day in the vicinity of $24.5 million. Should our forecast hold, the domestic cume should be around $233 million by the end of the weekend.

Fourth and fifth could be a fight between Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Paramount's Rocketman. On the one hand we're anticipating a steep drop for the Godzilla sequel, somewhere around -65% or so, for a three-day around $16.7 million. At the same time, we're expecting Rocketman to only dip around -38%, which would put it right around $16 million if it can meet that number.

In limited release, A24 will debut The Last Black Man in San Francisco in seven locations and Super LTD will release This One's for the Ladies in one theater.

This weekend's forecast is directly below.

1. The Secret Life of Pets 2 (4,561 theaters) - $51.0 M
2. Dark Phoenix (3,721 theaters) - $39.2 M
3. Aladdin (3,805 theaters) - $24.8 M
4. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (4,108 theaters) - $16.7 M
5. Rocketman (3,610 theaters) - $16.0 M
6. Ma (2,816 theaters) - $8.3 M
7. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2,776 theaters) - $6.3 M
8. Avengers: Endgame (2,121 theaters) - $4.9 M
9. Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2,161 theaters) - $3.7 M
10. Booksmart (1,134 theaters) - $1.4 M