Weekend Box Office At $37M, Near 2022 Low Before ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ Soaks Up All The Air
10.12.2022 - 19:33
/ deadline.com
What happens when there’s no wide theatrical releases and it’s the holiday season as we emerge from the pandemic? Why, you get the second-lowest box office weekend of the year at an estimated $37.2M. We’ll see if Saturday night business is so bad that that this weekend becomes the lowest of 2022, unseating that of Jan. 28-30, when all movies grossed $34.87M, per Comscore.
Top pic this weekend is, of course, the fifth go-around of Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which is estimated to make $11M. Yesterday with $2.8M, the Ryan Coogler movie crossed the four century mark with a running cume of $401.55M, pacing 5% ahead of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness over 29 days.
Also, with20th Century Studios/Disney’s Avatar: The Way of Water set to conquer all business next weekend with a potential $200M domestic start, nobody wants to waste the marketing dollars to play in front of that, especially when moviegoing doesn’t pick up until after Christmas, when there’s zero holiday distractions and kids go on break.
A year ago, you’ll remember Disney made the mistake of opening Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story on the second weekend of December ahead of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and no one came, resulting in a box office take at $10.5M over 3-days. No studio was willing to risk a wide release this weekend after seeing how that went down.
However, in pre-pandemic times, family films playing ahead of year-end titans have done great on the second weekend of December, i.e. Jumanji: The Next Level, which opened to $59M ahead of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker‘s $177.3M start in December 2019, and 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, which opened to $35.3M ahead of Warner Bros/DC’s Aquaman. Solid family