Weekend predictions: Jungle Cruise should sail choppy waters to the top of the chart

July 30, 2021

Jungle Cruise

Jungle Cruise enters this weekend as a firm favorite to take the box office crown, even though family films have been performing notably weaker in recent weeks and Disney has the film available for a premium via Disney+. Our model thinks it will do roughly twice the business of the number two film on the chart, and there’s a good chance it’ll do even better than that. With the other two new wide releases not expected to do huge amounts of business though, it’s likely to be a flat weekend for the market as a whole unless Disney’s latest theme-park-ride-turned-movie outperforms expectations.





Disney has, of course, a long track record of reusing existing IP in its major productions. So much so that the model found seven good comps in the two-year span of 2018 and 2019. This release follows in the footsteps of Cruella, which opened with $21.5 million over Memorial Day weekend. The model thinks Jungle Cruise should do something similar. In fact, the model’s prediction for Cruella was $15.9 million, which is extremely close to its $17.2-million prediction for Jungle Cruise. If Jungle Cruise over-performs expectations to the same extent it’ll post a $23 million weekend.

Jungle Cruise already posted $2.7 million from preview screenings on Thursday, which compares favorably to Cruella’s $1.4 million on its first evening in theaters. So it would be a slight surprise at this point if the jungle adventure doesn’t top $20 million easily, and a weekend of $30 million seems on the cards. If it has the same ratio of Thursday-evening to weekend box office as Cruella, it’ll hit $40 million by Sunday. That seems like a long shot, but my personal rule of thumb is that a movie earns around 10 times the Thursday preview number over opening weekend, and $27 million feels about right for Jungle Cruise right now.



The model has fairly modest expectations for Stillwater, even though it’s a film with an impeccable pedigree, being directed by Academy Award-winner Tom McCarthy, starring fellow Academy Award-winner Matt Damon, and premiering at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month. Reviews for the film have been mixed, but its box office fortunes are dependent more on its legs than its opening, and Focus Features has a great record of shepherding films like this to success after they open with around $10 million.

With the current state of the market, that translates into a predicted opening around $5 million. It earned $280,000 from previews last night, which suggests that figure is a stretch, but it’s not the kind of film to draw a big preview crowd, so the jury remains out on whether it’ll hit its mark this weekend.



The Green Knight’s distributor, A24 has been quietly building a track record of mid-Summer wide releases over the past few years. Midsommar is a prominent example, of course, and Hereditary and It Comes at Night both arrived around this time of year in 2018 and 2017 respectively. Although they weren’t wide releases on opening weekend, The Farewell (2019) and Eighth Grade (2018) were also modest hits for A24 that came out in July.

That makes now a logical time for them to release The Green Knight, and it looks as though it’ll quietly slot into the top 10 this weekend, with a shot at the top five. It posted $750,000 in previews yesterday, which makes $5 million for the weekend look likely, and gives it a handy head start on Stillwater, which the model slightly favors over the weekend as a whole. If it can maintain this momentum, it could be the surprise breakout movie this weekend—even if it falls well behind Jungle Cruise in overall box office.





The three new releases should all end up in the top seven this weekend, but it’ll take one of them outperforming the model’s prediction substantially for us to see an up weekend for the market as a whole. A $27-million weekend for Jungle Cruise would be a big help, but we’ll also need to see the returning films hold strongly. That hasn’t been happening recently, and my feeling is we’ll see a flat weekend overall. Given the growing COVID-19 case counts, that amounts to a win, but clearly there are significant headwinds for the industry as a whole at the moment.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Cruella, Jungle Cruise, The Green Knight, Stillwater, Matt Damon,