Weekend projections: Swifties kill Flower Moon

October 22, 2023

TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR

TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR will handily win the weekend at the box office, according to studio projections released on Sunday morning. The concert movie will drop about 67% from its opening to $31 million. Killers of the Flower Moon will post an excellent opening in second place, but won’t hit the highs hoped for on Friday.

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



The Eras Tour will end the weekend with about $130 million in the bank so far domestically. Its second-weekend drop is about in line with expectations: our model thought it would fall 66%, for example. How it fares from here is still an open question, but it’s clearly doing enough business to stick in theaters for a while. By comparison, Michael Jackson’s This Is It dropped 43% in its second weekend, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never declined 55%, and Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour dropped 67%. The low final multipliers for those films (Hannah Montana finished with just over double its opening weekend) suggest Taylor Swift might top out at around $200 million, with $250 million an outside bet if it bounces back for further sold-out shows during Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Eve.

Click here for a full comparison of the biggest concert movies of all time.

Killers of the Flower Moon will give Martin Scorsese his best opening weekend since Shutter Island back in 2010. While $23 million is quite a bit behind what our model forecast on Friday, that was based on very strong previews on Thursday. Our original prediction of around $21 million is looking pretty good, and those Thursday numbers, boosted by showtimes as early as 2pm, flattered to deceive. Given the reviews, the audience demographic, and the beginnings of Awards Season, this is a film that will run and run.

One theory on why the film lost legs after Thursday’s numbers is that the actors’ strike dampened the buzz. Scorsese fans turned up on Thursday, but the lack of publicity from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro accounts for the loss of momentum through the weekend. I think there’s something to that idea, and there’s no question the prolonged strike is hurting the industry. It seems like that steady trickle of films getting moved back in the hopes their stars will be available for promotion in 2024 will continue.

- Studio weekend projections
- Barbie’s day-by-day performance comparison with Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese