Weekend projections: Fast X has biggest international opening of 2023 to date

May 21, 2023

Fast X

Fast X won’t quite hit the $70-million plus North American opening that looked on the cards on Friday, but $67.5 million is a very respectable number for a domestic debut—the fifth-best opening of 2023 in fact. More impressively, it’ll clock up a projected $251.39 million internationally, giving it the biggest weekend outside North America so far this year.

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



Our model thinks an opening weekend of $67.5 million is equivalent to around $96 million in pre-pandemic dollars, which would have made this the 3rd-best opening for the Fast and Furious franchise. That may be a little too generous an assessment, but there’s no question this installment continues an excellent run of form for the franchise going back to 2009’s Fast and Furious.

The main highlight internationally is a $78.3-million debut in China, which is the biggest MPA opening of the year in that territory. That has been a very good country for Fast and Furious movies since Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious both earned over $390 million there. This outing won’t reach those levels, but it should easily surpass $150 million.

Other standout territories include Mexico, where it will open with $16.7 million; France, with $9.6 million; Brazil, where its $9.6 million will be a franchise record, and the 9th-best opening of all time in the territory; and India, which should clock in with $8.6 million, the second-best opening of all time for a non-super hero MPA release.

With lots of competition, the North American prospects for Fast X aren’t perhaps as great, but it should land somewhere between $150 million and $200 million before its run is done. That should make it something like the 6th-highest grossing film of the year, at least for a week or two—The Little Mermaid seems likely to overtake it sometime in early June.

The rest of the movies on the chart generally came in a bit behind expectations. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 was undoubtedly hit by direct competition from Fast X. The films outside the action space generally had good weekends: Book Club: The Next Chapter held on decently in its second weekend, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret held on well in its fourth weekend considering it lost nearly 700 theaters from last time. The standout performance by a returning film comes from Blackberry, which moves up from 11th to 9th this weekend with just a 29% decline from its opening.

Overall, the weekend is coming in quite a bit behind where the model expected on Friday, but it’ll still be up 18% from last weekend, and we’ll comfortably log the seventh straight weekend with over $100 million earned by all movies in theaters.

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

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Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Fast and the Furious