Weekend projections: Spider-Man wins again

June 25, 2023

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will top the box office chart in its fourth weekend in theaters, according to studio projections released on Sunday morning. That says a lot about the performance of recent releases The Flash and Elemental, which should by rights be dominating the chart right now. No Hard Feelings is on its way to a solid opening weekend, and will finish fourth.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

Spider-Man is actually coming in slightly behind our model’s prediction, so its weekend win is largely due to The Flash’s dramatic 72% drop from its opening. I introduced a new component to the model this weekend to better predict the second weekend for major new releases, and it worked to an extent, in that it predicted Elemental would do quite a bit better than The Flash, but at the end of the day The Flash is really dropping away fast, and will finish the weekend with just $87.6 million in the bank. It should still hit $100 million domestically, but it’s only going to limp there. Useful points of comparison are Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. The Flash made 82% as much as Black Adam on opening weekend, and just 56% as much on its second weekend. Shazam! Fury of the Gods tumbled 69% in its second weekend, and was nearly out of theaters three weeks later.

Elemental is doing a little better this weekend, indicating good word-of-mouth, but it is still a massive disappointment for Disney. More than anything, I think it reflects the harm to the Pixar brand done by a series of direct-to-Disney+ releases. Clearly a rethink is needed.

No Hard Feelings and Asteroid City are both coming in well below our Friday-morning prediction, but actually beating our model’s fundamentals predictions. In both cases, the high preview numbers on Thursday threw the model off. That’s happened a few times in recent weeks, and I’ll dig into it some more ahead of this coming weekend when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny could be set to post very high preview numbers.

I’ve noted that $160 million seems to be a natural upper limit to the total box office each weekend at the moment, absent a blockbuster opening. This weekend will fall well short of that—in fact, it’ll barely crack $100 million. That suggests competition isn’t making films like The Flash and Elemental falter, but a demand for something new and different.

While Wes Anderson isn’t new at this point, he’s certainly different, and Asteroid City will deliver the best single weekend of his career (at least before adjusting for inflation). Maybe there’s a message there for the industry?

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com

Filed under: Wes Anderson