Weekend projections: middling to poor Dumbledore makes for weak Easter

April 17, 2022

Reports of the death of the Harry Potter franchise will most likely be greatly exaggerated in the coming days, but there’s no denying that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is doing far worse than Warner Bros. would have hoped for when the first three films in the Fantastic Beasts franchise were announced back in October, 2014. Seven and half years is a long time in the film business, and the disruption caused by the pandemic did nothing to help this film. However, in the context of the performance of the previous two films in the franchise and the changes to the moviegoing audience caused by the pandemic, its opening, which Warner Bros. projects at $43 million as of this morning, is actually not far behind what our model predicted.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look this morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

Going into the weekend, our model predicted Secrets of Dumbledore would earn $47.7 million based on the fundamentals—i.e., the performance of previous films in the franchise adjusted for the change in theatrical audiences due to the pandemic. Its Thursday previews pointed to a weekend around $46 million, and our final prediction was $46.4 million. That’s not very far away from Warner Bros.’ projection, but unfortunately coming in below the prediction suggests that the audience for the film is quite front-loaded. Potter fans showed up in decent numbers on Thursday, but the film really isn’t reaching a broader audience. While its reviews are better than the previous outing in the franchise, word of mouth is unlikely to be enough for it to recover significantly.

Perhaps the most telling statistic is that Fantastic Beasts 3 will earn about the same as Uncharted did on its opening weekend back in February. Of the two films, my money is on Uncharted getting a big-budget sequel.

Father Stu is coming in on the low end of our Friday-morning prediction, but its $5.7-million debut is respectable for a film that’s difficult to classify (and was undoubtedly hard to market). The continued breakout success in theaters is Everything Everywhere All At Once, which expanded into 2,220 theaters this weekend (a few more than expected, which boosted our prediction somewhat). It will top $6 million over the weekend, putting it past $17 million in total. Even with some competition coming out next weekend, it should have a good run over the next few weeks, and maybe longer. It’s already A24’s 10th-highest grossing film, and should easily end up in their top 4, beating such notable films as Moonlight and Ex Machina.

As a whole, the market is down a disappointing 10% from last weekend. The blame for that result can mostly, alas, be laid at the feet of Fantastic Beasts.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com

Filed under: Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them