Weekend predictions: Black Widow favorite for second weekend win
July 16, 2021
In one of the more unpredictable weekends at the box office in recent months, our model makes Black Widow a comfortable favorite to top the box office chart, but Space Jam: A New Legacy can’t be ruled out of the running yet if the Disney movie falls more steeply than expected from its $80-million opening weekend.
Space Jam is a tough movie to predict, since it’s a sort-of-sequel to a kids movie that came out nearly 25 years ago. The previous installment opened with $27.5 million the weekend before Thanksgiving, 1996, and this new installment certainly has a chance of pulling in something similar this weekend. However, the best opening for a family movie during the pandemic was Cruella’s $21.5-million opening weekend, and family films in general have only been pulling in about half their usual audience recently. Our “pandemic adjustment” for family films actually stands at 47%, having declined a little after the relatively soft performance of The Boss Baby: Family Business.
It’s hard to tell what influence the simultaneous availability of Space Jam on HBO Max will have on its box office chances, but it most likely won’t help. The model doesn’t explicitly factor that in to its calculations, but the fact that Cruella and Boss Baby also had simultaneous home releases means the model has that built in by proxy. In other words, our prediction of an opening weekend just shy of $20 million factors in everything we can see about the market right now. It’ll need to do quite a bit better than that to pull off a weekend win.
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions looks very unlikely to top the chart, and the model is predicting an opening of around $6.5 million. That’s based on a pandemic adjustment of 48%, which is one of the highest figures our model has reached, and was helped by a boost from Black Widow last weekend.
The comparable films above uses PG-13-rated horror movies, and may be doing Escape Room a bit of a disservice. The first film opened with $18.2 million, and this installment might have had a shot at $20 million under normal circumstances. If roughly half of moviegoers are attending theaters right now, then a $10 million weekend seems like a decent possibility, but anything more than that would be a surprise.
Overall, the model is feeling good about Black Widow’s chances of winning the weekend, with a predicted 55% decline from last time around. The main caveat I’d note about the prediction is that we don’t have very much data on the second-week performances of “hit” movies during the pandemic. F9 fell 67% in its second weekend, and personally I think that’s a better benchmark than the average performance of all films released recently, which is what the model uses. A 67% decline for Black Widow would give it a $26.4-million weekend. Space Jam could threaten that number if it outperforms the model’s expectations.
Whatever happens at the top, it’s virtually certain we’ll have a down weekend at the box office this weekend, with the top six likely to make something around $80 million, and all films combined falling short of $100 million. The good news is that there’s something for everyone in theaters this weekend. The rising COVID-19 case counts around the US pose a threat to the continued recovery of the theatrical business though, and we’re clearly not out of the woods yet.
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Filed under: Weekend Preview, Cruella, The Boss Baby: Family Business, Black Widow, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions