Weekend projections: Blue Beetle and Strays post weak opening numbers

August 20, 2023

Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle and Strays will both have disappointing opening weekends, even in light of the end of the Summer season. Blue Beetle is headed for a little over $25 million, the second-worst opening for a movie in the DC Extended Universe, ahead of only Wonder Woman 1984, which opened in the middle of the pandemic. Strays will hit approximately $8.3 million this weekend, for a fifth-place start.

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



Blue Beetle won’t find much comfort in international markets, with an opening of just $18 million outside North America. The film has undoubtedly been harmed by the actors strike, which has prevented the usual promotional activities for a film like this. It’s hard to say how much that affected the box office, but it’s hard to believe that it would have come close to the $56 million-or-so that our model thinks is a par score for a DC-Universe film.

The numbers for Strays probably give a better measure of how the strike is affecting the marketing of films. The model thinks it should have come in with around $11 million this weekend. Its actual debut is $2.7 million—about 25%—below that number. So a “strike adjusted” target opening number for Blue Beetle, assuming the strikes is causing a 25% decline in box office, would be around $42 million. Its one consolation is perhaps that it’s doing better than Shazam! Fury of the Gods once the effect of the strike is taken into account. That might mean we’ll see it have slightly better legs in the weeks to come, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

Barbie continues to cruise towards $600 million. The lack of competition this weekend helped it stay above $20 million for another weekend. Its $21.5 million will be the 10th-best 5th weekend of all time. Notably, it has overtaken The Super Mario Bros. Movie on a comparable weekend chart for the first time since its second weekend, and it is just a little over $7 million short of becoming the top-grossing movie of the year—a record it seems almost certain to hold on to.

Oppenheimer is the other film to do measurably better than our model’s prediction, even though it lost premium screens to Blue Beetle. The weakness of the two openers puts a $100-million weekend in jeopardy. The combined earnings of the films reporting projections so far comes just short of $97 million. We’ll probably just make it over $100 million when all is said and done, but it’ll be close.

- 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: DC Extended Universe