Weekend predictions: a tight race at the top
February 3, 2023
Three films have a realistic shot at topping the chart this weekend, with Knock at the Cabin and 80 for Brady opening, and Avatar: The Way of Water continuing to be, well, Avatar. With the likes of The Chosen Season 3 Finale ratcheting up good numbers already, we’re in for an interesting weekend at the box office.
There’s a lot to get through, and the hour is late, so I’ll dive right in with our fundamentals and previews predictions for Knock at the Cabin.
M. Night Shyamalan needs no introduction of course, and has one of the best track records in the business, at least so far as opening weekends go. The model included all his recent films in its analysis, and thought the film has a shot at a $20-million-plus opening. It doesn’t look as though it’s working out that way so far, with its $1.45 million in previews fractionally behind Old, which went on to a $16.85-million opening weekend.
The model takes a weighted average of the fundamentals and previews predictions to produce a final number of around $18.5 million. That feels high to me, but even $17 million (the previews prediction) should be enough to win the weekend.
But, not so fast…
Knock at the Cabin had quite an edge over 80 for Brady going into the weekend…
… and the preview numbers for the comedy aren’t high enough to shift the prediction upwards.
…but this is a very hard one to predict.
Films aimed at older audiences can have very good opening-weekend legs, and there aren’t many films that are direct comparisons to this one. One film that the model discarded because of low preview numbers, but which is probably the best creative comp is Poms. That did only $225,000 from previews, but posted $5.36 million on opening weekend, for a sky-high 23.83 multiplier. If 80 for Brady did that, it’d land with $17.9 million for the weekend.
So we find ourselves in the intriguing situation that, if M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie performs like his previous film, and 80 for Brady performs like the most recent widely-released comedy about elder sports fans, we’ll basically have a tie at the top of the chart.
Although the model thinks there’s a decent gap between the films, I’m not so sure. We’ll know more tomorrow when we get the Friday numbers.
Here’s what that model thinks the top 10 will look like.
Avatar: The Way of Water isn’t entirely out of the running for a weekend win, but it looks most likely to end up second or third in its eighth weekend in theaters.
The model predicts that The Chosen: Season 3 Finale will earn $8.8 million based solely on the fact that The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 opened with $8.8 million. The asterisk on that one is that it opened on Thursday. Fathom Events hasn’t announced an official number, but it was the top-grossing film in North America for the day. If that eats into its weekend numbers, it might land closer to $7 million.
The good news in all this is that we finally have an “up” weekend at the box office, after a steady week-to-week decline since the New Year. The Super Bowl my interfere with the recovery next weekend, but Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania should get things rolling seriously again after that.
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Filed under: Weekend Preview, Avatar: The Way of Water, Knock at the Cabin, 80 for Brady, The Chosen Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2, The Chosen Season 3 Finale, M. Night Shyamalan