Weekend predictions: F9 eyeing a $70-million opening

June 25, 2021

F9: The Fast Saga

There’s no question which film will top the box office this weekend. F9: The Fast Saga has long been anticipated as a landmark release as theaters reopen around North America, pandemic restrictions are lifted, and audiences regain their appetite for sitting in an enclosed space with hundreds of strangers. It doesn’t even have much competition—$6 million might be enough for it to win the weekend, and it already earned more than that in previews last night. The real question is how much it will bring in this weekend. Given its pedigree and buzz, the minimal benchmark for success is the $47.6 million earned by A Quiet Place: Part II on its Friday–Sunday opening weekend over the Memorial Day holiday. All the signs are that it will go much higher than that.

Here’s what our model has to say this morning…





There have been enough films in the Fast & Furious franchise that our model uses them alone in constructing its prediction. The only real question was whether to include Hobbs & Shaw in the calculation. In the end I decided not to, but it was a close call. If it is included in the model, the opening weekend prediction falls by about $3 million.

The tougher decision was how to estimate the proportion of moviegoers attending theaters. Our global measure, which includes all films released this year, currently stands at 38%. If we only look at films released since the beginning of April (when Godzilla vs. Kong arrived on the scene), the estimate shoots up to 51%. If we only look at action movies released since Nobody on March 26, the estimate is 66%. Tempting as it was to use that figure for action movies, I decided to go with the middle figure (51%), which produces the $54.6 million prediction above. For the record, using the conservative 38% figure based on all movies would predict an opening of $40.7 million, and using the aggressive 66% estimate produces a prediction of $70.6 million.

All that decision-making occurred before Thursday’s preview numbers were announced. Now we have them, I wish I’d assumed our estimate for the audience for action movies to be accurate—something I was reluctant to do because it’s based on the performance of just four films.

Here’s how things might play out based on the $7.1 million in previews announced by Universal this morning…





Films in the franchise have generally earned about 10 times their preview number over their complete opening weekend. We haven’t had many films generate significant revenue from previews recently but it’s worth noting that A Quiet Place: Part II had almost exactly that ratio, posting a Friday–Sunday figure of $47.5 million after $4.8 million in previews. The worst ratio among recent films is Demon Slayer, which earned $3.8 million from previews and $22.8 million over its opening weekend.

I think it’s possible that F9 is more heavily front-loaded than the typical movie, given the advance buzz and anticipation among its fans. So even though our action movie model and the preview comps are eerily close in their predictions and point to a weekend a shade over $70 million, I think they might end up being a tad high. Certainly $60 million plus seems very likely, and my gut feel is that we’ll see a weekend around $65 million. Given that’s almost $20 million more than A Quiet Place: Part II’s benchmark figure, it would be reason to celebrate.





The overall numbers for the weekend are of course dominated by F9. In the spirit of honesty, I’ve used my original prediction in the chart above, but based on what we know this morning you can add $10 million to $15 million to the number shown here. That will mean the top six will more than double the number posted last weekend, and the total from all films will eclipse the $81.4 million earned by all films over the three-day portion of Memorial Day weekend. That puts us on course for the first $100-million weekend of the pandemic era, something that hasn’t happened since Onward opened on March 6, 2020.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Godzilla vs. Kong, F9: The Fast Saga, Nobody, A Quiet Place: Part II, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba—The Movie: Mugen Train (劇場版「鬼滅の刃」 無限列車編), Fast and the Furious