Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are together again for the third film in the Bad Boys franchise, Bad Boys For Life, and it looks like their latest effort is going to arrest some serious box office coin over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Bad Boys For Life enters box office tracking with a potential opening of $40-45 million over the four day MLK holiday. The opening is pretty much in line with other action comedies that have opened over that holiday frame which includes Ride Along ($48.6 million ) and Ride Along 2 ($41 million). The 2014 Ride Along, starring Kevin Hart and Ice Cube, was the record opening over MLK until Clint Eastwood’s wide break of American Sniper rose the benchmark to a stellar $107.2 million in January 2015.
The budget on Bad Boys For Life is surprisingly low by major studio standards with Sony spending $90 million on the film before marketing costs. This puts the film in a good position to turn a profit if fans embrace it. Good reviews will help but I have a feeling that even if the critical outlook is poor, the film will be relatively critic-proof.
The first Bad Boys movie launched in 1995 just as Will Smith’s and Marin Lawrence’s big-screen careers were warming up and made $141.4 million worldwide. The sequel, Bad Boys II, made eight years later, grossed $273.3 million worldwide which brought the franchise’s total to $414.7 million at the worldwide box office.
The new film follows Marcus Burnett (Lawrence), who is now a police inspector, and Mike Lowery (Smith), who is in a midlife crisis. The two unite again when an Albanian mercenary, whose brother they killed, promises them an important bonus.
Also hitting tracking is the decidedly more expensive and problematic, Dolittle, starring Robert Downey Jr. The film, which features Downey Jr. as the title character that can talk to animals, has it tracking at $25-30 million over the MLK weekend. This would be a solid start if the film didn’t cost a staggering $175 million to make. The film, directed and written by Traffic Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, underwent 21 days of reshoots according to reports last spring, with director Jonathan Liebesman and Lego Batman helmer Chris McKay overseeing fresh rewrites. Dolittle was set to be released back in April but the reshoots shifted the release date. This is going to take all of Downey Jr.’s box office clout to make this one work. The vocal talent for the animals features an all-star cast that includes Tom Holland, Antonio Banderas, Rami Malek, Emma Thompson, John Cena, & Selena Gomez among others.
