Thus is why you don’t want to get too hasty with box office predictions.

Neither Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials or Black Mass did what they were expected given Thursday grosses, but Black Mass is certainly the bigger winner here.

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials opened with a weak $11M opening day. While that’s only a bit off from its predecessors Friday, it seemed as though it would get a bit of a sequel bump given that the first one was a word of mouth hit that lasted in theaters for a long time and anticipation would be higher for the sequel. Instead, it’s only going to wind up with around $27-$29M for the weekend. It got a B+ on Cinemascore which means word of mouth probably isn’t going to help or hurt it.

Black Mass took in a solid $8.8M. While it will probably miss the $30M mark, that’s a very strong debut for such a brutally violent R rated drama that seemed like a bit of a hard sell. Audiences gave it a B Cinemascore, which is fine given its very mature content.

The real story, however, was how great Everest did. The studio made the wise choice to release it in IMAX and large format theaters a week early, because if it opened normally on the 25th it would’ve only had 5 days in those theaters before The Walk took over. Clearly this was the right thing to do as it took in a whopping $2.3M, set for a weekend of over $7M. With these kinds of numbers, Everest could climb to a $40M debut or more next weekend.

Captive took in a weak $647K, the latest in the Christian drama trend that for some reason has received almost half a dozen entries in the last month. That’s lower than 90 Minutes in Heaven and will likely disappear from theaters quickly.

In limited release, Sicario started off strong with $133K, which gives it a per theater average of around $22K. Whether or not this will only do well with the arthouse crowd or mainstream audiences is yet to be seen, but should do well given its excellent critical reception and large amounts of online buzz. That is, if it doesn’t get crushed by The Martian which opens the same weekend.

Updated Predictions

Maze Runner – The Scorch Trials – $26.5M Black Mass – $25M Everest – $7M