Weekend estimates: Wrath of Man posts solid $8.1 million opening

May 9, 2021

Wrath of Man

Wrath of Man will pull off an easy win at the box office this weekend, according to Sunday morning’s projection from United Artists. It’s easily outperforming our model’s prediction with $8.1 million expected for the full weekend. Its strength probably had an adverse effect on the numbers for Demon Slayer, Mortal Kombat, and Godzilla vs. Kong, all of which failed to live up to expectations. With Here Today also struggling, we’re looking at a slightly down week at the box office.



Wrath of Man’s performance is undoubtedly the highlight of the weekend. Prior to the pandemic, Guy Ritchie’s previous film, The Gentlemen, opened with $10.65 million, and Jason Statham’s Mechanic: Resurrection opened with $7.46 million. So $8.1 million would be in line with expectations even at the best of times. Right now, it’s another sign that the audience for action movies is returning to theaters.

In fact, our model’s estimate of the share of action movie fans currently going to theaters is now around 66%, which makes it the strongest sector in the market. It has overtaken family films, which the model has pegged at drawing 49% of their regular audience. (We haven’t had a new family film in theaters in quite a while though, so that number is looking dated—the actual share is probably higher.)

Here Today is headed for $900,000 this weekend. As I mentioned in the predictions article, the prediction for this movie depended on whether we should expand our “romance” category to a broader “date night” category by incorporating comedy-dramas. Based on this result, the answer seems to be yes. Using that classification, it actually slightly out-performed what the model would expect, but things remain tough for this sector. Based on the performance of Here Today, the model now thinks that 15% of the regular date-night audience is currently going to theaters.

Overall, although this weekend is falling a little below expectations, the opening of Wrath of Man is enough for the model to tick up its estimate of the share of regular moviegoers currently going to theaters to 37% after falling to 36% after last weekend. That’s a modest shift, but the slow upwards trend seems to be continuing.

- Weekend studio estimates

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Godzilla vs. Kong, The Gentlemen, Mortal Kombat, Here Today, Wrath of Man, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba—The Movie: Mugen Train (劇場版「鬼滅の刃」 無限列車編), Guy Ritchie, Jason Statham