Weekend projections: One Love tops chart, and heads to $50-million-plus six-day opening

February 18, 2024

While it will technically fall short of having the best weekend of 2024 so far, Bob Marley: One Love is unquestionably the first hit of the year. Its unusual “opening weekend,” running from Valentine’s Day on Wednesday through the end of the President’s Day holiday on Monday, will generate $51 million at the box office, according to Paramount’s Sunday-morning projection. Its three-day, Friday-to-Sunday, opening will land at about $27.7 million, less than $1 million behind Mean Girls $28.6-million debut back in January. With excellent audience word-of-mouth, there’s still a chance Marley could top that figure.

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

What really stands out in the overall numbers for the weekend is how strongly all the returning films are performing. Generally, President’s Day weekend isn’t a big holiday, but a combination of a bump from that, plus a comparison with a market hit hard by last weekend’s Super Bowl, means several films are coming in well ahead of our model’s prediction.

The openers are doing less well, comparatively, but that’s largely because the model had a tough time pinning down the influence of their opening days on February 14. Weighing up all the factors, I thought One Love should hit $25 million for the three-day weekend, and that has proven to be the case. Likewise Madame Web’s debut is about in line with lowered expectations.

Internationally, the Bob Marley biopic will pick up about $29 million this weekend, opening at number one in 13 markets. It set opening-day records for a music biopic in the UK and France (although it’s tracking behind Bohemian Rhapsody over the weekend in the UK), and is (appropriately) having the biggest opening weekend of all time in Jamaica. The audience in the US is 53% female, 60% between the ages of 18 and 44, and splits evenly demographically: one third Caucasian, one third Black, and a quarter Hispanic. It will top a $1-million opening in six territories: the United Kingdom ($9.3 million), France ($5.5 million), Australia ($2.0m), Germany ($1.8m), Brazil ($1.8m), and Mexico ($1.0m). Its $280,000 from 5 cinemas in Jamaica is a new island record.

Madame Web, meanwhile, will earn $25.7 million internationally, and hit number one in 29 (mostly small) markets. Its top markets are the UK ($2.9m), Mexico ($2.9m), France ($1.6m), Australia ($1.5m), Germany ($1.5m), Brazil ($1.5m), and Spain ($1.0m), all over the five-day extended weekend.

A couple more notes back home: The Chosen: Season 4, Episodes 4–6 is holding on well through the weekend but still tracking well behind Episodes 1–3—see our full comparisons here. It should be helped by the holiday tomorrow, but looks set to earn around half of the amount picked up by the previous release in the series.

Finally, Land of Bad, a star-studded action movie, will give The Avenue Entertainment their first top 10 movie. The distributor has made a bet on these kinds of films, which generally do well on VOD, and it looks as though this one has paid off theatrically too. $1.8 million isn’t record-setting, of course, but seeing another distributor find a way to decent theatrical earnings is good news for the business as a whole.

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

Please help support The Numbers with a monthly or one-time donation, or by subscribing to The Numbers Business Report. We keep advertising to a minimum, and only for advertisers who we believe are directly of interest to our readers. If you’d like to advertise your movie or service with us, please email us at advertising@the-numbers.com