Weekend predictions: Demeter won’t challenge the reigning champs

August 11, 2023

Barbie will charge past $500 million at the domestic box office today, and top the box office chart for the 4th consecutive weekend. With The Last Voyage of the Demeter looking like it will struggle to gain any traction, Oppenheimer will most likely regain second place ahead of the second weekend of Meg 2: The Trench.

Going into the weekend, Last Voyage of the Demeter already looked like it had an uphill battle to land high on the chart…

Its Thursday preview numbers fell short of expectations though…

Our model thinks the film’s underlying strengths (basically, being a horror movie from a well-established studio) could give it some legs over the weekend as a whole. My suspicion is that things won’t get much better though, and a weekend around $6 million is likely.

Bleecker Street has a fairly solid record of getting films like this close to $1 million on opening weekend, and the model thinks Jules has a shot at $800,000 plus given its theater count, the strength of the market, and audience interest. That might be enough to get it into the top 10.

Here’s what the model thinks the top 10 will look like.

I made an adjustment to the model this week that will hopefully improve the accuracy of its predictions for movies playing for three weeks or more. It’s a little technical in its details, but basically assumes films will follow their historical trends—if demand has been falling at 10% a week for last three weeks, it now assumes it’ll fall by another 10% this week. The film most affected by this adjustment is Barbie, which the model would have predicted at closer to $40 million under the old model. We’ll see how things work out over the weekend.

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Bruce Nash

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Barbie, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Meg 2: The Trench, Oppenheimer, Jules