Weekend estimates: Honest Thief cruises to second weekend win

October 25, 2020

Honest Thief

With limited competition, Honest Thief will cruise to a second box office win according to studio estimates released on Sunday morning. Open Road is projecting $2.35 million over three days, down 35% from last weekend, for $7.5 million to date. As expected, The Empty Man was not much of a force, although it did slightly improve on our prediction.

Honest Thief’s 35% decline is very slightly better than the 41% average decline for films released wide since August, which is a sign either of good word of mouth, or slightly improved market conditions. Open Road is understandably going with the former explanation, with Tom Ortenberg commenting, “Our belief was that releasing a crowd-pleaser of a film, like Honest Thief, at this point in time, would generate the positive word-of-mouth necessary to successfully propel the film for many weeks. Back to back weeks at number 1, confirms that belief.” The distributor is also celebrating the performance of After We Collided, which opened in the United States this weekend (after a Canadian release back in September), and will earn around $420,000 this weekend, as well as being the number one digital release this week.

Things don’t look as rosy for The Empty Man, which will earn a projected $1.26 million this weekend, per Disney. That’s 12% higher than our prediction, which was itself nudged down 25% because the film had received virtually no marketing. Again, maybe the market is looking a little better—and it should be noted that some theaters in New York state opened up this weekend—or perhaps the lack of marketing wasn’t such an impediment for this kind of movie released under these circumstances.

Overall, it looks as though the top six will be down almost 25% from last weekend, mainly due to the lack of competition at the very top of the chart. A weak debut for Monsters Inc. on its re-release—it made $494,000 from 1,875 theaters—also pulled things down. The Nightmare Before Christmas falls just one spot this weekend, in spite of losing 56% of its box office since last weekend to tally $577,000 this time around. Hocus Pocus will be down 30% to $530,000, but will stay in the top six.





Tenet will earn another $4.6 million globally this weekend for a worldwide total of $341.4 million. The domestic market is comfortably its best again, with $1.3 million taking it to $52.5 million in total. It’ll earn $836,000 in Japan for $23.1 million there, and $393,000 in Germany, for a total of $18.8 million. Its best territory globally is China, with a total reported gross of $66.4 million.

- Weekend studio estimates
- Weekend predictions
- Weekend theater counts

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Monsters, Inc., The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, The Empty Man, Honest Thief, After We Collided, Liam Neeson