Weekend predictions: Demon Slayer is a slight favorite to win the weekend
April 30, 2021
After last weekend’s fireworks, business will be much quieter at the box office this time around, with horror movie Separation the only new wide release, and the winner of the weekend almost certainly down to which of Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train falls the least from their strong opening weekends. Our model thinks that Separation will find a place in the top six, but it’ll be well behind the reigning champions. Demon Slayer is marginally favored to top the chart in its second weekend, but the race will be close.
Separation joins a long line of horror movies that have been released during the pandemic, and the model expects it to come in at around $2 million this weekend. That’s assuming that 37% of moviegoers are currently going to theaters. As I’ve been discussing recently, the rate of the recovery of the theatrical market is a challenge to measure at the moment thanks to the relatively small number of films coming out. Morning Consult’s latest survey has the figure at 41%, which would translate into a weekend slightly over $2 million.
Even though it’s not a landmark release, Separation will be a good measure of how the market recovery is coming along: anything over $2 million is another good sign that people are coming back to theaters. (Although, as always, don’t read too much into the performance of a single film.)
The big question going into this weekend is how Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer will hold up in their second weekends. Box Office Pro expects Demon Slayer to play in around 2,000 theaters this weekend, which is higher than our model’s estimated 1,700 locations. How many theaters it actually ends up in will probably determine who wins the weekend. I’m assuming in this morning’s predictions that Box Office Pro is close to the mark, but the model basically thinks that even a modest increase in theaters will be enough to put the anime film top of the chart, a first for the genre.
Overall, there’s no question that this weekend will be down from last weekend, but it’s worth noting that the combined box office take of all movies will easily top $30 million, making this the third-best weekend of the year so far.
Note: This article was updated on May 2 to correct the previous weekend total in the summary chart.
Filed under: Weekend Preview, Godzilla vs. Kong, Separation, Mortal Kombat, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba—The Movie: Mugen Train (劇場版「鬼滅の刃」 無限列車編)