After two weeks of sloth, Hollywood started rolling out its pre-holiday product. The weekend’s easy winner will be SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (Sony Animation/Columbia/Sony), which had a $12.6M Friday according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, including $3.5M from Thursday night. That should give it a $35M+ weekend. Projections after that are tough, because there aren’t a lot of films to compare it to, since the intersection of animation and superhero franchise is a fairly new one, and Spider-Verse is considerably more modest than The Incredibles 2 with its $182.7M opening and the live-action Spider-Man: Homecoming with its $117M. In addition, this is the first pre-holiday weekend in December not to feature a giant Hobbit or Star Wars blockbuster since 2011. Word of mouth should be strong, so the weekend number could go considerably higher than the current estimate. Beginning next week, Spider-Verse will have the benefit of the mammoth holiday family trade, and its US total could easily climb past $150M.
THE MULE (Bron/Warners) is aimed at the diametrically opposite audience from Spider-Verse, but older viewers, like the very young, often give a film legs. The Mule had a $5.7M opening day, which could give it a $17M weekend. It has the potential for a healthy holiday run, but its word-of-mouth may suffer from the fact that it’s mostly a low-key character study, and not the action movie its marketing promises. With a relatively moderate $100M in production/worldwide marketing costs, it should in any case have a good chance of finding profit.
The same can’t be said for MORTAL ENGINES (MRC/Perfect World/Universal), which carries $200M+ in costs and managed just $2.8M on opening day for a $7M weekend. Even the holidays won’t rescue a loser that big, and its early international returns haven’t been promising either, although it hasn’t yet arrived in China.
THE GRINCH (lllumination/Universal) continues to hold strongly, down 17% to $2.7M on its 6th Friday for a $12.5M weekend. With the holidays dead ahead, it may have the potential to pass $300M in the US.
RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET (Disney) isn’t holding as well, down 42% to $2M on its 4th Friday for a $9M weekend. It’s falling more steeply than 2016’s Moana, and is more likely to end up around Coco‘s $209.7M in the US.
CREED II (MGM/New Line/Warners) dropped 48% to $1.4M on its 4th Friday for a $5M weekend, on its way to $125M in the US, which would be nearly a 15% bump over the first Creed.
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (Regency/20th) is riding Golden Globe and SAG nominations as well as its own word of mouth, down 32% to $1.1M on its 7th Friday for a $4M weekend. If it can hold onto its theatres through the holidays, it would have a shot of pulling past $200M in the US.
FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD (Warners) declined 44% on its 5th Friday to $1M, heading for a $4M weekend and a hope of passing $175M in the US, down 25% from the first Beasts.
INSTANT FAMILY (Paramount) is holding on, down 35% to $1M on its 5th Friday for a $3.5M weekend, and a US total that might get to $75M with some holiday help.
ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL (20th), the PG-13 recut of Deadpool 2, isn’t attracting much interest with a $750K Friday and a weekend that might not get much past $2M (which would be a $3.3M total since its opening on Wednesday). Costs were minimal, but there seems to be little audience for a tamed Deadpool.
GREEN BOOK (DreamWorks/Participant/Universal) added just a few theatres and dropped 34% from last Friday to $700K, headed for a $2.5M weekend. Now that the major pre-Oscar nominations are out, it’s not clear what the film is waiting for if it’s planning a wider expansion beyond its current 1215-theatre run.
THE FAVOURITE (Fox Searchlight) widened to a near-wide 439 theatres and earned $700K on Friday, en route to a $2.5M weekend, or $5700 per theatre. That’s roughly the same average Victoria & Abdul had at a wider 732 theatres.
Early numbers on the 4-theatre opening for IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (Annapurna) estimate its weekend per-theatre average at $65K (boosted by in-theatre Q&As), a solid start but below the exclusive opening averages for The Favourite ($105.6K) and Moonlight ($100.5K).
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