Weekend predictions: The Marvels will struggle to get to $50 million

November 10, 2023

The Marvels

Things don’t look good for The Marvels going into this weekend. After lukewarm (and sometimes hostile) buzz leading up to the release of the film, ticket pre-sales have been disappointing, and its Thursday preview numbers were a downright awful $6.6 million. That’s the worst preview number for a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie since Ant-Man back in 2015. That film went on to earn $57.2 million over its opening weekend. With sequels tending to be more front-loaded, it looks like The Marvels will struggle to reach $50 million this weekend.

That’s a far cry from what Disney would have been hoping for. The first Captain Marvel started out with $153.4 million on its opening weekend, and even with a theatrical market that’s much weaker than 2019, the studio will have been hoping for something around $100 million domestically this weekend. Our advance tracking suggested that would be hard, but still doable.

The warning signs were already flashing before we saw the preview numbers, with our audience tracking having the film generating about 85% of the interest that the model would expect. Note also the unusually high negative sentiment in our Sentiment Analysis. While this largely came from online trolls who weren’t going to see the film in the first place, Disney has clearly struggled to build positivity around the film.

The preview numbers are basically the final nail in the coffin of a big opening weekend.

We’ve changed our model this week to hopefully increase the accuracy of our final prediction based on the reported previews for a film and our fundamentals prediction. Our old model would have predicted $52.1 million this weekend for The Marvels. We’ll see on Sunday if our new model’s $45.2-million prediction is closer to the mark. In either case, this looks like a poor weekend, and might go some way to explaining why Disney just moved several MCU films back from 2024 to 2025.

The other new wide release this weekend is the faith-based musical Journey to Bethlehem. This is a tough film to predict, but the model believed something around $8 million was a possibility (and note the high level of positivity around the film in our sentiment analysis):

The preview numbers for the film are a slightly disappointing $250,000.

It’s not unusual for a film like this to have a high multiplier from its previews to the final weekend number, so Journey to Bethlehem can hardly be written off at this point. Our new previews-to-weekend model is particularly harsh on this movie, and I think it’s safest to say that we should see a weekend somewhere between $3 million and $8 million, with the lower end looking more likely at this point.

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

While this will undoubtedly be an “up” weekend from last time, the weakness of The Marvels means we’ll almost certainly fall short of $100 million in total. That’s a blow going into the Thanksgiving period, although there are plenty of films coming in the next couple of weeks that can fill the void.

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Filed under: Weekend Preview, The Marvels, Journey to Bethlehem, Marvel Cinematic Universe