Box Office: ‘Magnificent Seven’ and ‘Storks’ Set to Unseat ‘Sully’

Featuring an all-star cast led by a witty and smoldering Chris Pratt and a stoic Denzel Washington, MGM and Columbia’s “The Magnificent Seven” is set to top the box office this weekend.

Recent movies in the genre serve as a litmus test: “Django Unchained” opened to $30 million, “True Grit” debuted to $24 million and “The Lone Ranger” lassoed $29 million when it launched in theaters — the last widely-released PG-13 film in the category.

Following the group’s debut 2014 hit “The Lego Movie,” Warner Animation Group’s sophomore outing with “Storks” is looking to pass the $30 million mark, with industry trackers seeing opening numbers as high as $40 million.

The animated feature was made for $70 million (not counting marketing costs) and is set to open in roughly 3,900 locations.

Featuring Andy Samberg, Kelsey Grammer, Jennifer Aniston, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in the voice cast, the movie covers the challenges of one final baby delivery mistakenly assigned to the storks after they have moved into inanimate parcel deliveries.

WAG’s goal is to put out a movie per year, as its future slate includes “The Lego Batman Movie,” due in theaters Feb. 10, 2017; “The Lego Ninjago Movie,” coming out Sept. 22, 2017; “Smallfoot,” set for a Feb. 9, 2018 release; “The Lego Movie Sequel,” in theaters Feb. 8, 2019; and a few more.

WAG’s animated feature inspired more than 11,000 social media mentions in the past week, with an overall total of nearly 65,000.

Representing more than 170,000 new conversations, the top movie this past week, however, is “Fifty Shades Darker” — due to the recent release of a new trailer and poster.