Weekend predictions: Halloween Kills headed to weekend win

October 15, 2021

Halloween Kills

Halloween Kills, the 12th installment in the virtually un-killable Halloween franchise, should comfortably top the box office chart this weekend, even it falls well short of the $76.2-million opening weekend earned by its predecessor, simply titled Halloween, back in 2018. It has already banked a respectable $4.850 million from previews in 2,950 theaters on Thursday, and adds another 755 locations today. Here’s what our model has to say about its likely opening, based on what we know so far. I’ll also dig into the prospects for The Last Duel, and see how the weekend as a whole is stacking up.

As usual, I’ve run two predictions for the films for which we have Thursday preview numbers. Here they both are for Halloween Kills…







The model is taking a cautious approach with horror movies at the moment after some recent misfires, and is estimating just 50% of the pre-pandemic audience is coming out to see them right now. If Halloween Kills maintains its pace coming out of Thursday evening, it should top the model’s $35.9-million prediction. Based on the performance of horror movies through the weekend, it looks a good bet for an opening around $45 million, possibly a bit higher. As has been been my recent practice, I’m taking the average of the “fundamentals” prediction and the “previews” prediction to produce a final projection of $41.2 million this weekend. That would be a good result for the venerable franchise, and it should get an additional bump from Halloween in a couple of weeks.







The model wasn’t expecting huge fireworks from The Last Duel, which is likely to attract an older audience that doesn’t show up in huge numbers on opening weekend. It could prove to have good legs, and it’ll need them to make much of a mark overall. The good news is that its earnings from previews last night is in line with a slightly better-than-expected weekend. Films like this tend to have very high multipliers between the Thursday previews and the final weekend total.

A high multiplier would take The Last Duel over $6 million this weekend. Averaging the two predictions gives us a final prediction of $5.69 million.





There doesn’t seem like much chance Halloween Kills will finish anywhere other than first this weekend. The model thinks No Time to Die and Venom: Let There Be Carnage will be locked in a very tight race for second place though, with Bond the marginal favorite as of now.

Overall, we’re looking at a minor down weekend compared to last time, but the top eight should earning around $100 million between them, and the market as a whole should top that psychological barrier. That would extend our streak of $100-million weekends for the market to three, and that’ll only be the fifth such weekend during 2021. The market’s slow recovery looks like it’ll continue.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Halloween, No Time to Die, Halloween Kills, Venom: Let There be Carnage, The Last Duel, Halloween