Weekend estimates: Nobody maintains market momentum

March 28, 2021

Nobody

An excellent opening for Nobody is more than making up for sluggish results for returning films this weekend and keeps the market recovery on course. More or less.



Going in to the weekend, I had a feeling Nobody might do better than our model predicted, and that’s been borne out by Universal’s weekend projection. The Ilya Naishuller/Bob Odenkirk film is headed towards a $6.7-million debut, according to the studio, which is the best opening performance for a thriller during the pandemic, beating The Little Things’ $4.8-million first weekend back in January.

Numbers like that are a good sign that the market is recovering, although the red in the right-hand column of the chart above tells us that the rising tide isn’t lifting all ships yet. Instead, it looks as though Nobody is drawing at least some of its audience from other films. Chaos Walking seems to have taken the biggest hit, which isn’t surprising given its appeal to a similar audience, but the lackluster numbers for Raya and the Last Dragon and Tom and Jerry are a bit of a disappointment. As I mentioned on Friday, if the market recovery is in full force, I’d expect those films to more-or-less maintain their numbers from week to week. The fact that they’re falling around 30–35% this weekend suggests that this weekend’s overall result comes more from a single movie drawing its audience into theaters.

The demographics for Nobody is interesting in this respect. Universal measures its audience as 62% male, which is the highest reported figure since The New Mutants drew a 66%-male audience back in August. Demographically, Nobody is (unsurprisingly) virtually identical to John Wick: Chapter 3, which drew an audience that was 63% male and 26% under the age of 25. Nobody’s audience is 62% male and 27% under 25s.

The most male-skewing film in our demographic database, by the way, is Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which had a 67%-male audience on its opening weekend. The strong performance of Nobody is an encouraging sign for the release of its sequel Godzilla vs. Kong next week.

A week-on-week growth of 11% in the combined box office for the top six is also good news, and the fact that it’s clearly not coming from the family-audience segment this weekend gives further cause for optimism. It’s clear that the theatrical market isn’t going to magically recover with the release of one film, but rather over months, and that parts of the recovery will look something like it does this weekend: one film over-performing and bringing back a few thousand moviegoers who are comfortable venturing into theaters again. Hopefully they’ll persuade some of their friends to come check out Godzilla do battle with Kong next weekend.

- Weekend studio estimates

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Godzilla vs. Kong, The New Mutants, Chaos Walking, Nobody, Ironbark, Raya and the Last Dragon, Tom and Jerry, The Little Things, Bob Odenkirk, Ilya Naishuller