Weekend estimates: Uncharted posts impressive $44.155 million to lead Presidents Day parade

February 20, 2022

Uncharted

Uncharted and Dog are both posting very good numbers over the Presidents Day weekend, lifting the market as a whole over $90 million for the three-day part of the long weekend, and making this the best weekend at the box office so far this year. Uncharted is having the best weekend of 2022 for a single movie, with $44.155 million projected by Sony this morning for Friday–Sunday, and $51 million over the four-day weekend. That beats our Friday-morning prediction of $39.4 million, and Sony’s Friday-morning prediction of $40 million, suggesting that the film is building an audience based on word-of-mouth recommendations.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look this morning…




Virtually every film is beating our model’s prediction, partly because it doesn’t yet factor in the effect of Holiday weekends. (Holidays weren’t a big influence on box office when I built the model, but it clearly we’re getting back to a more normal market in that regard.) But the performance of Uncharted and Dog suggests that the market as a whole is recovering, and our “pandemic adjustment” will move up from 56% to 61% as a result of the performance of those two films. That’s about where things were hovering between July and November last year, before the effects of Delta and Omicron waves were felt at the box office.

Dog is actually arguably doing even better than Uncharted. Its $15.135-million opening is on par with another dog-led movie, Clifford the Big Red Dog, which opened with $16.6 million back in November. But that film had an pre-existing audience and was much more focused towards families—Dig is rated PG-13—so Dog almost certainly found a broader audience demographically, and blew our $5.44-million prediction out the water. That might just be a case of our model not getting a good handle on a film, but it could also be a sign that at least some sectors of the market are behaving much more like normal.

The only movie that’s underperforming the model this weekend is The Cursed, which will come with about $1.72 million, compared to our prediction of $2.16 million. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, given the film has a fair amount of competition and hasn’t had the kind of promotion enjoyed by most other films in the top 10. It’s projected to hit $1.95 million over the four-day weekend.

- Weekend studio estimates
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Uncharted, The Cursed, Dog