Weekend estimates: Space Jam opens with impressive $31.65 million
July 18, 2021
Families returned to movie theaters in a big way this weekend, and helped propel Space Jam: A New Legacy to a strong $31.65 million opening, according to Warner Bros.’ Sunday-morning projection. With Escape Room: Tournament of Champions also beating our model’s prediction, the newcomers made up for soft results for returning films.
Space Jam ended way ahead of our Friday-morning prediction, which relied on estimated theater counts. The final theater count increased our prediction marginally, to $19.7 million from $19.6 million, but that’s didn’t do much to close the gap. The fact is that the $31.65 million opening for Space Jam is a really good result. Before the pandemic, our model would have predicted a $42-million debut for the film, and the actual result is just 24% below that figure, meaning that it reached 76% of its target audience. That’s easily the best for a family film during the pandemic era—Cruella held the previous record at 68%—and only Wrath of Man, which our model thinks found 81% of its normal audience, has done better among all films released since September, 2020.
Warner Bros. reports that 32% of the audience for Space Jam was under 18, which is quite a high figure by historical standards. Pokémon: Detective Pickachu had an audience that was 27% under 18, and 33% of Dumbo’s audience came from that demographic, for example. But it’s a fair amount lower than a couple of recent films. 50% of the opening-weekend audience for The Croods: A New Age were under 18, and a whopping 56% of the audience for The Boss Baby: Family Business. That suggests that Space Jam’s opening figure is at least in part due to it reaching beyond the family audience. It’s also worth noting that more kids saw Space Jam on its opening weekend than saw The Boss Baby: Family Business (at least based on using a somewhat crude measure of multiplying each movie’s opening weekend by the under-18 audience share).
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions also outperformed the model’s expectations, albeit by a more modest margin. The model thinks it found 65% of its target audience this weekend, which is again good news. The “pandemic adjustment” (our model’s estimate of how much of the normal audience is attending theaters at the moment) will tick up to 51% as a consequence of this result. That’s the highest that figure has reached so far, and the general trend looks promising. In May, films earned about 37% of their potential, according to the model. In June, that figure rose to 52%; and July’s new releases have reached 54% of their target audience.
The biggest disappointment among the returning films was Black Widow, although as I noted on Friday its 67% second-week decline isn’t really a surprise, and happens to be exactly the same drop as the one we saw for F9 in its second weekend. In short, it looks as though the model could do with refining to better handle returning blockbusters. Disney’s movie now has $132 million in total, putting it third of the chart for 2021. F9 will end this weekend just $200,000 behind A Quiet Place: Part II, with those two films now sitting at $154.8 million and $155 million respectively. Black Widow still has a pretty good chance of overtaking them both.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Cruella, F9: The Fast Saga, The Boss Baby: Family Business, The Croods: A New Age, Black Widow, A Quiet Place: Part II, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, Wrath of Man