Weekend estimates: Godzilla vs. Kong delivers monster* $32.2-million weekend
April 4, 2021
Godzilla vs. Kong will earn $32.2 million over the Friday–Sunday weekend, and deliver a $48.5-million 5-day opening, according to Warner Bros.’ Sunday morning projection. The film will earn an additional $3 million in Canada from its PVOD release there, which the studio offered to allow Canadian audiences to see the film while around 80% of the Canadian market remains closed. It’s also showing on HBO Max in the US, but the studio hasn’t offered any numbers on its performance there.
To get a sense of where the strong opening for Godzila vs. Kong is coming from, we can look at what our model has to say about the results. Our model’s prediction for GvK based on our pandemic adjustment was $13.7 million at the beginning of the week (note that this is different from our Friday prediction, which was based on Wednesday’s and Thursday’s actual results). It looks as though it has hit the returning films quite hard, with our model estimating that $3 million or so of the film’s box office is coming from people picking it to watch it instead of a film they would have watched if it wasn’t playing. The remaining $15 million or so comes from people who were drawn back to theaters for this movie, either because they’ve been waiting for the right movie to come along or because they’re feeling more comfortable with going back to theaters generally (or, most likely, a combination of both factors).
Going in to the weekend, our model’s estimate of the share of moviegoers comfortable going to theaters was 29%. As I mentioned in our 2021 market forecast article, that number was beginning to look a little low, and this weekend’s results seem to confirm that suspicion, and not just because of Godzilla vs. Kong’s strength. The Unholy also beat the model’s prediction by a comfortable margin with $3.2 million, which was enough to put it in second place for the weekend.
This weekend’s results would cause our pandemic adjustment to move from 29% to 32% using the rules I’ve applied since the beginning of the pandemic reopenings, which includes all films released so far to estimate audience enthusiasm. Since we seem to be on a clear upswing now, with the last seven films to come out all beating the model’s prediction, I’m moving to considering only the films released wide in 2021 when making the adjustment. That’s arguably still over-conservative, but ensures we are using enough films (10 of them right now) that the performance of a single release won’t skew the results too dramatically. Using the new rule, our pandemic adjustment is now 37%.
Overall, it almost goes without saying that this weekend really confirms that the theatrical market is on its way back. Warner Bros. deserves credit here for finding a way to get a film of this scale into theaters, albeit in a way that wasn’t entirely satisfactory to theater owners, and the one frustration facing the industry is that we won’t have another film with this potential size of audience open in theaters until Cruella and A Quiet Place: Part II debut over Memorial Day weekend. Perhaps a film like Voyagers or Mortal Kombat will outperform expectations, but the business environment for theaters looks very tough for at least a couple more months.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Godzilla vs. Kong, Voyagers, Mortal Kombat, The Unholy