Weekend projections: Barbarian wins on slowest weekend since January

September 11, 2022

Barbarian

As expected, this has turned out to be a very slow weekend at the box office. Even so, four films are posting encouraging numbers, according to the studio’s Sunday-morning estimates. Barbarian is out-performing Friday morning’s prediction handily, and is expected to post around $10 million over its opening weekend. Brahmastra Part 1: Shiva is doing great business for a Bollywood film, with an expected $4.4 million. Top Gun: Maverick is doing what it has done all Summer by holding on strongly. Finally, Lifemark is posting very strong numbers from a targeted release.

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



Barbarian’s strength is quite impressive for a horror movie, suggesting it has had good word of mouth through the weekend. It and Brahmastra are both being distributed under Disney banners, so the studio can claim the top two spots at the box office this weekend, albeit for films that aren’t part of their usual slate.

The model had quite a challenge predicting how this weekend would turn out, given we were coming off Labor Day weekend, and National Cinema Day boosted sales for quite a few movies last Saturday. Most films fell quite a bit more than predicted, but Top Gun once more held on exceptionally well given that it lost 108 theaters from last time. It surely will fade over the next few weeks, but its run is one for the ages, with 16 weekends in the top 10 now, including a first-place finish last weekend.

Lifemark is the biggest surprise of the weekend, in the sense that there was no official announcement of its theater count, and it wasn’t advertised much through the regular channels. There’s no question that it found its intended audience though, with the faith-based drama posting a weekend of over $2.2 million.

Overall, as expected, we’re looking at a very slow weekend. The arrival of Studio weekend projections
- All-time biggest weekends - All-time top-grossing movies in North America
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Bruce Nash,