Weekend predictions: Shang-Chi still rules as industry braces for worst weekend since May
September 24, 2021
Dear Evan Hansen will be taking a long-shot swing at unseating Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings from the top of the chart this weekend. Our model, and the movie’s preview numbers, suggest it’ll fall some way short, giving the Marvel action movie a fourth straight weekend at the top of the chart. That’s the longest continuous run at the top since Tenet dominated the pandemic-ravaged chart in September last year (The Croods: A New Age also spent five weeks at number one, split between December and February, but didn’t have four straight weekends at the top). The limited number of major new releases since Shang-Chi came out is significantly hitting the market as a whole, and this will be the slowest weekend at the box office since Spiral’s $4.6-million second weekend was enough to give it a weekend win back on May 21.
Dear Evan Hansen is a rare movie that wasn’t delayed by the pandemic, having started filming in August last year, and sticking to its September 24 release date since Universal announced it in January of this year. However, the consensus is that the movie is coming too late, particularly in its casting of 27-year old Ben Platt (who starred in the original production) as a high school student. We don’t have a lot of data on musicals during the pandemic. In the Heights was generally seen as a big disappointment when it came out in June, but our model actually thinks it did quite well, comparatively speaking. Its $11.5-million opening translates into around $27 million under pre-pandemic conditions. The model thinks Dear Evan Hansen would have done about the same pre-pandemic.
The challenge for predicting this release is whether to consider it a film for “general” audiences, who are coming to theaters in about half their pre-pandemic numbers, or if it will appeal more to a “date night” crowd, who are coming at 22% of pre-pandemic levels, based on (relatively few) recent results. I chose the date-night option, giving the film a predicted opening weekend of $6.48 million. For the record, if I’d assumed it would perform like the average film for general audiences, the prediction would have been around $15 million.
Now the preview numbers are in, it looks as though the film will fall somewhere between those two extremes. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! earned $3.4 million in previews and $34.95 million on opening weekend. Cats posted $550,000 in previews on its way to a $6.62-million debut. A multiplier of 10 for Dear Evan Hansen would translate into an $8-million weekend. The relatively small number of musicals with reported preview numbers adds quite a bit of uncertainty to that figure, so I’m sticking with the model’s $6.48-million prediction. I wouldn’t be surprised if the final figure was closer to $10 million, but $15 million looks well out of reach.
With Evan Hansen likely to come in short of $10 million this weekend, Shang-Chi will win easily again, and the top ten as a whole will struggle to produce more than $40 million at the box office. As I mentioned earlier, this will be the weakest weekend at the box office since May, although that’s largely down to the lack of major new releases. Venom: Let There Be Carnage and The Addams Family 2 should fix that problem next weekend, but we again find ourselves relying on new releases to hit it big in order to bring the market back to life. The good news is that October has a potential hit every weekend.
Filed under: Weekend Preview, The Croods: A New Age, In the Heights, Venom: Let There be Carnage, Dear Evan Hansen, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Spiral, Ben Platt