Early ‘Speed Racer’ box office numbers

I keep using my amazing ‘knife in Speed Racer tire’ photoshop, because well, it’s appropriate. ‘Speed Racer’ is doing even worse than expected, going by the early box office numbers. It only made $5.85 million Friday and might not even top $20 million for the weekend! That’s an amazing low for a $100 million project, not to mention the $100 marketing budget — some even claim the movie’s budget was as high as $185 million.

As seen above, ‘Speed Racer’ was even topped by the relatively cheap ‘What Happens in Vegas,’ which did $6.7 million. And it was slaughtered by the one and only ‘Iron Man,’ which did a decent $15.3 million — everything looks good next to ‘Speed Racer’ at this point.

‘Iron Man’ will likely do an estimated $45 million this weekend, which would make for a good second week. But as we saw in the post-weekend drop and weekly roundup, it’s only down for Robert Downey Jr. since last weekend.

More on the ‘Speed Racer’ box office numbers and totals when they come in.