Weekend predictions: Thor shooting for second-best weekend of 2022

July 8, 2022

Thor: Love and Thunder

Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World: Dominion, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and now Thor: Love and Thunder. The first three films to open over $100 million since Memorial Day weekend are about to be joined by a fourth, and all of them share a common characteristic: a colon in their title. Coincidence? Yes.

And also, no.

The colon, of course, signifies that we’re returning to familiar territory, and all four of these blockbusters have stuck closely to the formula that made their franchise successful in the first place. Love and Thunder follows the fan favorite Thor: Ragnarok, and brings back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster. It feels like a continuation of the saga, and fans are flocking already.

More on that in a moment. First, here’s what our model thought of Thor’s prospects before we had Thursday preview numbers:

Outside of the Avengers movies, Marvel titles have being opening with around $120 million for a while. The high theater count for Love and Thunder helped boost the model’s prediction, as did high levels of interest on social media. Given we’re still in recovery mode, that should translate into a weekend around $115 million about now.

The big question mark, however, was whether Love and Thunder would get the kind of out-sized opening enjoyed by Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which the model thinks was worth about $208 million in pandemic-adjusted numbers, and was a very healthy $187 million in actual dollars. To be on track for that, Love and Thunder needed to come somewhere close to the $36 million earned by Doctor Strange 2 from its previews.

And… it’s quite close to that number, if not perhaps close enough to make Strange’s 2022 record come under threat:

As I’ve noted a couple of times recently, opening weekends seem to be quite front-loaded at the moment. Doctor Strange was very front-loaded, with a previews-to-weekend multiplier of just 5.21. That would translate into a weekend of $151 million for Love and Thunder if it did the same. The typical film with that kind of Thursday number earns about 6 times its previews, which suggests something around $178 million is very doable for Thor 4.

Our final prediction is a weighted average of the “fundamentals” prediction and the “previews” prediction, and comes in at $163 million. That would give Love and Thunder the second-best weekend of the year, behind Doctor Strange. It could fall away more steeply, but I think it’ll top Jurassic World: Dominion’s $145 million debut, which is currently the number 2 weekend of 2022.

Here’s how our model thinks the top 10 will work out…

Thanks to the fact we have four other movies that should top $10 million this weekend, and in particular because of The Rise of Gru’s chances of earning more than $40 million this time around, we should see a combined weekend of over $250 million, which would make this the best weekend of the year so far. That’s a good number any year, in fact, and comparable to the second-best weekend of 2019, when The Lion King helped take the domestic box office to $263 million over the weekend of July 19.

Our model is still cautious about declaring the pandemic over, but things are looking healthier than they have in a long time.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Top Gun: Maverick, Minions: The Rise of Gru, Jurassic World: Dominion, Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Avengers, Natalie Portman