Weekend predictions: Spider-Man eyes $150-million weekend

December 17, 2021

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home is already rewriting the pandemic record books, after posting a spectacular $50 million in previews on Thursday. That’s the third-best preview number ever, and well ahead of our model’s most optimistic prediction going into the weekend. Every film not in the Twilight Saga franchise that has earned even half that amount from previews has gone on to open with over $150 million. So a very, very big weekend is in store. So big, that it’s taken quite a bit of number crunching to settle on what I think is a good prediction.

First up, here are our model’s “fundamentals” prediction (based on recent similar films) and “previews” prediction (based on the previews).







Given the performance of previous Spider-Man outings—Far From Home earned $92.6 million on its opening weekend in 2019, and Homecoming made $117 million in 2017—something around $100 million would be considered a solid result under pre-pandemic conditions. Other super-hero movies have come in a bit better than that, after adjusting for pandemic effects, and No Way Home is debuting in an ultra-wide 4,336 theaters, so a weekend of $125 million under pre-pandemic conditions is what the model would expect. Adjusting for the pandemic, that translates into an $82-million debut.

The previews paint a dramatically different picture though. Films with between $40 million and $60 million from previews generally earn about four to five times that amount over their opening weekend. After factoring in traditionally stronger legs for Spider-Man franchise films, the model thinks a multiplier just under five is about right, which points to an opening weekend well in excess of $200 million.

Those two numbers—$80 million and $200 million—are so far apart, it’s hard to confidently predict how much we’ll see Spidey make this weekend. To bring a bit of order, I pulled up the results of previous analysis based on both our fundamentals and previews models.



It turns out that the previews are a slightly better predictor of opening weekend than the fundamentals model (unsurprisingly), but combining the two produces the best result. Using a linear regression of the above results gave me a final prediction of $153 million for No Way Home this weekend, with the final figure likely to fall between $139 million and $191 million.

We’re really in uncharted territory though.





Nightmare Alley is another tough film to predict, although I’m at least confident that it won’t top the chart this weekend. Films aimed at a slightly older audience have struggled recently, and Guillermo del Toro doesn’t have a lot of recent wide releases on which to base an analysis (The Shape of Water, for example, took many weeks to expand wide, and never earned much more than $5 million from any of the weekends it was in release). The real issue with this one is the potential audience size, which the model pegs at about 37% of its pre-pandemic level. That turns a potential $10-million opening into more like $3 million or $4 million.





One thing we know for sure is that this weekend will be the best of the pandemic era. The previous market high point was a combined $128.4 million for all films the weekend of October 1, when Venom: Let There Be Carnage opened. Spider-Man should beat that number all on its own this weekend. With luck, we’ll see returning films hold on more strongly as we go into the holidays. West Side Story is one I’ll be watching closely. It’ll need something well over $5 million to have a chance of holding on to theaters over Christmas and getting a good run at the box office.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Nightmare Alley, Spider-Man: No Way Home