Weekend predictions: Mario unthreatened by six new wide releases

April 14, 2023

No less that six new wide releases arrive in theaters this weekend, the most of the post-pandemic era, beating the five wide releases that arrived the weekend of September 16 last year. None of them will come close to beating The Super Mario Bros. Movie in its second weekend. The battle for second place looks interesting though…

The film most likely to come in second this weekend, according to our model, is the black comedy about the Prince of Darkness, Renfield, which looked set for close to $10 million this weekend before the preview numbers came in…

Lead actors Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage bring some star wattage to this release, and Universal is having a great year so far. Mario is its biggest hit of course, but the studio has had success with M3GAN and Cocaine Bear too, and those two films both share some of their DNA with Renfield.

Black comedies can be a hard sell to broad audiences though, so topping $10 million would be a victory. Thursday’s preview number suggests that’s well on the cards…

The warning signs in the list above are The Menu and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which starred Hoult and Cage respectively and had weekend multipliers under 10. That puts the lower range for Renfield somewhere around $8 million for the weekend, but my hunch is that it’ll manage to beat $10 million.

The Pope’s Exorcist is also on the cusp of hitting $10 million this weekend. Its pre-release prediction was almost identical to Renfield’s:

… and its preview number was just $50,000 lower.

The model uses exactly the same set of comps for The Pope’s Exorcist as it did for Renfield, but that extra $50,000 is enough to push Renfield just over $10 million, while keeping Pope’s Exorcist just below the line.

It’ll just take a tiny bit better word of mouth for The Pope’s Exorcist to end up winning this two-horse race. The numbers for these two films as running neck-and-neck so far.

But the race for second doesn’t end there. Anime film Suzume from director Makoto Shinkai also has a shot.

The model’s prediction going into the weekend suggested something in the $5 million to $10 million range for the film. Its preview number, $680,000, is quite a bit behind Renfield and The Pope’s Exorcist, which would seem to consign it to fourth place on the chart (or lower, depending on how some other returning films do). However, the model thinks it could have quite good legs through the weekend…

This may be a case where the model is working with too little information. The lack of comparable preview data for anime titles means that it’s relying on PG-rated films with similar earnings from previews. They usually have good legs, but the are also usually kids films, which isn’t a great match for Suzume. The bottom line is that there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty for this release, but Suzume looks as though it should have a good weekend. Recent anime releases have shown that a $10-million weekend isn’t out of the question.

Next up on the list is another hard-to-predict film, the faith-based supernatural thriller Nefarious…

This is the kind of film that could struggle to find an audience, but directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon have defied conventional wisdom before. The film’s page here at The Numbers has been getting a lot of traffic, which might be a quirk of search results or social media traffic, but could also indicate an interest in this film that hasn’t been picked up by the usual tracking services.

Topping $4 million would be seen as a surprise for Nefarious, but the numbers above show that it’s not out of the question.

Next up is Mafia Mamma, another comedy with a dark-ish touch (although not so dark as Renfield’s I would say)…

It might struggle to find an audience just because there’s so much competition this weekend, but our model thinks $3.5 million is on the cards. My personal opinion is that the film will struggle to reach that number.

Finally, Sweetwater is taking a crack at finding an audience…

Like Mafia Mamma, this feels like a film that will struggle to find an audience this weekend. Beating $2 million would be a real victory, in my opinion.

Here’s what that model thinks the top 10 will look like.

As I said at the top, Mario’s position at the top of the chart won’t be threatened this weekend. The model thinks it’ll fall quite steeply, partly because it did so well on its first weekend. Its daily numbers this week have been strong though, and family films often have good holds on their second weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if Super Mario Bros. tops $70 million this weekend. In any case, it’ll finish the weekend with well over $300 million banked, making it the first film to reach that landmark in 2023.

The level of competition among new releases makes it hard to say what the rest of the chart will look like exactly, but we could have six new releases in the top 10. That has only happened once before in chart history, over the weekend of March 23, 2007. I think Scream VI will sneak into the top 10 and keep us from equaling the record, simply because it’s hard to imagine all six new releases will hit their targets. We’ll see…

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Bruce Nash

Filed under: Weekend Preview, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, M3GAN, Renfield, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, The Pope’s Exorcist, Cocaine Bear, Scream VI, Suzume (すずめの戸締まり), Sweetwater, Mafia Mamma, Nefarious, Nicolas Cage, Nicholas Hoult, Cary Solomon, Chuck Konzelman, Makoto Shinkai