FRIDAY UPDATE: 'Cowboys & Aliens' $45M, 'Smurfs' $32M, 'Crazy Stupid Love' $19M

FRIDAY 5 PM UPDATE: Now I'm told that DreamWorks/Imagine/Universal's mashup Cowboys & Aliens is picking up steam at the box office tonight and could open with$17M grosses for Friday and a $45M weekend. "It's hitting a good pace," a Universal exec just told me. Maybe there's more room there because the weekend number is still on the low end of what the studio was expecting. Sony Pictures' Smurfs is looking even stronger for$12M today for a $32M weekend which is respectable for its target audience of very young moviegoers. And Warner Bros' Crazy, Stupid, Love is still looking like $6M today for probably a $19M first weekend in line with other recent rom-coms. Stay tuned for more updates and full analysis tonight. 12 PM: It's still very early so I'm not prepared yet to definitively say that DreamWorks/Imagine/Universal's mashup Cowboys & Aliens is dramatically underperforming because older audiences come out later. But sources are telling me that today's seeming $15M debut may add up to at most a$40M weekend which is below the studio's own lowball projections of $45+M. (This should have been done as a comedy!) Problem is that the budgethas beenpegged by insiders at $163M-$200M. And then there are big starsDaniel Craig and Harrison Ford,the god-fathering presence of Steven Spielberg and Imagine's Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, anddirectorJon Favreau of Iron Man films fame. Despite this pedigree, Cowboys & Aliens endured a tortured 14-year development history involving more than a dozen writers. (Just five writers received screenplay credit after the Writers Guild not surprisingly held an arbitration trying to figure out who did what.)Yet another Hollywood case study of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Tracking had been lagging especially with women of all ages until last Thursday when it popped up. Good thing Universal is only on the hook for 25%financing and domestic-only distributionwith DreamWorks taking 50% and Relativity Media 25%. Paramount is distributing foreign. Sony Pictures' Smurfs is looking like $10M today for $29M weekend which is respectable for its target audience of very young moviegoers. And Warner Bros' Crazy, Stupid, Love is looking like $6M today for probably a $18M first weekend. More numbers and full analysis later today.