CAPTAIN AMERICA LIKELY TO SET AN APRIL RECORD

With a planned release on Friday in nearly 4,000 theaters, 80 percent of which will be 3D, as well as 344 IMAX screens, Disney’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier will likely produce the biggest box-office take in history for the month of April, analysts are predicting. The current record for April was set by Fast Five in 2011 — $86.1 million. But box office pundits say that the Captain America sequel could easily pass $90 million and perhaps even $100 million. (BoxOffice.com, for example, is predicting $97 million.) Rentrak box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian remarked, “$90 milion wouldn’t surprise me. … If there’s any movie that can redefine what’s possible in April, this one feels like it.” It is currently accounting for 82 percent of all advance ticket sales at Fandango.com. In any event, there appears to be little doubt that the movie will overtake The Lego Movie, which became the top-grossing movie of 2014 when it opened with $69 million in February. While many media columnists have commented about what would ordinarily be considered a summer tentpole movie opening in April, Warner Bros. distribution chief Jeff Goldstein, in an interview with Bloomberg News, observed, “What you are seeing this year is absolutely a conscious move to space out releases,” to avoid last year’s pile-up that saw numerous blockbusters being released during the summer at virtually the same time.