Weekend projections: Songbirds & Snakes stays top on Thanksgiving weekend

November 26, 2023

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes will pull off a surprise second win at the box office over Thanksgiving weekend, besting Disney’s latest animated feature and the historical grandeur of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon to pull off the win. Songbirds will make $28.82 million this weekend, according to Lionsgate’s Sunday-morning prediction. That’s a drop of 35% from its opening weekend.

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

That drop for Songbirds & Snakes is good for a film in its second weekend, although clearly the holiday is a big help. The movie will end the weekend just shy of $100 million domestically and it has almost exactly the same amount internationally so far. Its performance so far virtually guarantees another episode in the franchise will hit the big screen on way or another, with the relatively modest, $100 million, budget helping it head towards profitability. It’ll be the second Lionsgate film to hit $100 million domestically, after John Wick: Chapter 4.

Napoleon’s opening is perfectly respectable, and coincidentally very close to the debut of Killers of the Flower Moon back in October. Apple will be happy to the defray a chunk of the $200-million production budget for each film, and theater owners should be happy too, given the lack of audience-skewing fair available at the moment.

Wish, meanwhile, is another dud for Disney. It will post a very modest $19.5 million between Friday and Sunday, taking it to just $31.7 million after five days. That’s better than Strange World’s $12.15-million 3-day and $18.86-million 5-day Thanksgiving opening last year, but well behind Encanto, which overcame the effects of the pandemic to post $27.21 million from Friday to Sunday and $40.57 million over its first five days.

After looking completely dominant when it posted a $3.74 billion year at the domestic box office in 2019, Disney has been the number 2 studio every year since. This weekend was their last chance to catch up with Universal, which will win the race in 2023. Finishing second is hardly a disaster in many ways, but it’s clear Disney has some significant rethinking to do across its business. Its success with Disney+ has clearly come at a cost to its theatrical business.

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

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

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, John Wick: Chapter 4, Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Wish, Ridley Scott