Vampire Academy To Open a Week Early, Leaves RoboCop and Kevin Hart on Valentine's Day

Sony Pictures International will have the #1 movie of the weekend on Valentine's Day weekend, barring some kind of major catastrophe for the studio. That's because both RoboCop and the other wide release coming out that weekend, the Kevin Hart-starring remake of the brat pack drama About Last Night, will be distributed by Sony and the only other major competition for the weekend--The Weinstein Company's young adult adaptation Vampire Academy--has moved to the previous weekend. This is probably good news all around, as Vampire Academy threatened to take some of the younger and genre-centric audience that RoboCop will likely need to be a big hit. About Last Night, from the star of this weekend's record-breaking comedy Ride Along, should do well and might even compete with RoboCop on Valentine's, which is obviously a big date weekend and so comedies and dramas tend to do a bit better against tentpole competition. It also leaves Vampire Academy facing basically no "like" competition. There's The LEGO Movie for kids and The Monuments Men, which will likely skew older, but nothing that's right down the middle aimed at the 15-25 crowd. Even Simon Pegg's A Fantastic Fear of Everything is a pretty small release, a bit on the artier side of his movies, and has already been in wide circulation outside the U.S. for a while. Vampire Academy may not take #1, but it will likely do a bit better and still have a bit of legs for Valentine's Day weekend, when it will struggle to stay in the top five in its second week.