Weekend projections: PAW Patrol wins the battle for top spot

October 1, 2023

The pups of PAW Patrol rarely lose their battles on screen, and they are posting another victory off screen this weekend, heading to a weekend win at the box office with a projected $23 million debut. That’s just a shade higher than our Friday-morning prediction, and enough to see off two films that looked like contenders going into the weekend: Saw X with $18 million, and The Creator with $14 million.

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

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie will handily beat the debut weekend of PAW Patrol: The Movie, which clocked in with $13.1 million back in August, 2021. That was back when theaters were still in recovery mode, and our model thinks that would have translated into a $26.5-million weekend before the pandemic. In other words, much of the new film’s performance is down to a better market for kid-friendly films. But far from all of it—the model’s current adjustment says $23 million today is roughly equivalent to a $32-million opening pre-pandemic.

So we’re talking about an underlying growth of about 20% for the second cinematic installment in the PAW Patrol franchise. Paramount already has plans for PAW Patrol 3 with a 2026 release date. That seems like a long wait for current fans, many of whom will have aged out of the franchise by then, but it’s safe to assume a roughly equal number will have joined the fan base too. This franchise looks like it will have legs (and wagging tails).

The other established franchise to release a new film this weekend, Saw, is also doing decently, with Saw X is outperforming Spiral’s $8.75 million by a fair distance. Even adjusted for pandemic effects, the model thinks this is a slight uptick for the franchise: Spiral’s debut was worth $23.6 million in pre-pandemic terms, while Saw X is bringing in an adjusted $25 million, according to the model. Honestly, that might be down to going back to using the name of the franchise in the title of the film.

This weekend’s biggest disappointment is the opening of The Creator, which is gorgeous to look at but doesn’t deliver enough of a dramatic punch to satisfy critics and audiences. Its scores on Rotten Tomatoes, at 68% from critics and 76% from the audience, are good but not great. It probably needed to be great to get people out to theaters. As of Friday, the model thought it should earn $19.1 million this weekend. Its $14-million debut isn’t a huge miss, but means that it isn’t getting great word of mouth.

The biggest surprise this weekend is The Blind, which will land in fifth place with a little over $4 million, and a total close to $5 million including its Thursday opening day. The faith-based film came in under our radar (Fathom didn’t report a theater count until the last minute), so we didn’t have a prediction for its opening weekend. Needless to say, it’s an impressive number, and a reminder that the audience for these films is a large one.

Although it’s technically not a new wide release, Dumb Money expanded significantly, into 2,837 theaters, and this was meant to be its breakout weekend. It’s not really turning out that way, with the financial drama looking at $3.5 million over three days for a total so far of $7.3 million. It might have some legs, but it looks unlikely to reach $20 million in total.

With four completely new wide releases and a major expansion, Expend4bles was always going to be under pressure. With a 69% drop on its second weekend, the film has the unusual distinction of falling from second to ninth place at the box office this weekend. The last film to do that was, surprisingly, Encanto, which had to face off against six new wide releases over Christmas weekend, 2021. A full list of the 10 movies that have fallen from 2nd to 9th can be found here.

- Studio weekend projections
- Barbie’s day-by-day performance comparison with Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie
- 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: Saw, Paw Patrol