"X-Men: First Class" set for top honors this weekend at the Box Office

(CBS/What's Trending) - After a record setting Memorial weekend, movie theaters around the country are preparing for yet another super hero franchise to drive customers to the multi-plex. Twentieth Century Fox's "X-Men: First Class" is the 4th installment of the highly successful franchise which has generated over $1 billion in global revenue. Expect a weekend gross of around $50 million from this reinvented prequel to the X-Men franchise with a critically acclaimed director and top actors including James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence. The "X4" has gotten a pretty strong response on-line, particularly from the fanboy audience that is vital to this type of film's success and with "Kick Ass" director Matthew Vaughn at the helm the film has instant street cred.

Anthony Mango of ComicBookMovie.com elaborates:

My first thoughts when I had heard that they were considering doing the First Class film was that we were going to eventually witness a real piece of garbage. With how much of a let down X3 was to me, and how X-Men Origins: Wolverine was less than comparable to Batman Begins, I figured they had tapped the well and were just out to make some extra money. The end result would be some rushed project with a low budget that would put out a short film riddled with plot errors, no character development, and tons of pointless action sequences riddled with nonsense. I was wrong....thankfully.

Warner Bros.' "The Hangover Part II" is poised to have a strong 2nd weekend that should give the film a 2nd place finish with around $40 million. After breaking numerous box office records (including the top comedy opening of all-time) the R-rated smash propelled the industry an overall Memorial weekend revenue record. In just 7 days of release the film has earned nearly $150 million in North America and over $200 million worldwide. One of the scene-stealing stars of the film is a monkey and Entertainment Weekly's Kate Ward in an on-line feature penned a story appropriately titled: Burning Questions: Did the 'Hangover' monkey really smoke?

Rounding out the top 5 will be Dreamworks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2" in 3-D, Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" and "Bridesmaids" from Universal which will cross the $100 million mark this weekend.

Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Box office division of Hollywood.com (which acquired Paul's company Media by Numbers in late 2008) is the entertainment industry's foremost expert in box office tracking and movie industry trend analysis. He's also a weekly columnist for What's Trending, taking the buzz online and telling you how that's going to affect the weekend box office.