Weekend predictions: Scream should top Spider-Man this weekend

January 14, 2022

Scream

We should see a new movie at the top of the box office this weekend, with Scream heading for an opening somewhere around $30 million, and Spider-Man: No Way Home slowly descending from its stratospheric heights.

With preview numbers posted for Scream on Friday morning, we have a pretty good picture of what it should do. Our fundamentals model really struggled with this one though, since horror franchise sequels are all over the map when it comes to their opening weekends.







Our final prediction for Scream is the weighted average of the fundamentals prediction and the previews prediction. Over the course of 2021, the preview numbers were more predictive of the opening weekend than the fundamentals (as one would expect). I’m starting out 2022 by revising our model to weight the previews predictions three times more heavily than the fundamentals prediction. In this case, that produces a prediction for Scream of $29.4 million for the (three-day part of the) weekend. Based on how it started out the gate, it could beat that number by a bit, particularly with the long MLK Weekend to help it.

Our model is quite bullish on Spider-Man this weekend, which makes the race look quite tight at the top of the chart…





Personally, I think an 11% decline for Spider-Man would be amazing this weekend. Our model really likes the fact that it is holding on to theaters at a time in its run when movies usually move on to smaller screens or out of the playlist altogether. Could the long weekend help it have a hold in that region? Maybe. But anything much over $20 million would be good news for Spidey.

There’s one other new wide release this weekend, GKIDS’ Belle, which is opening in 1,300 locations. That’s the widest release ever for the distributor, and our model doesn’t have enough data to give a firm prediction. The $1 million above is almost a pure guess, but is consistent with the opening for Weathering With You, which made $1.8 million on its opening weekend from 486 theaters on this weekend back in 2020. The pandemic will almost certainly pull the numbers for Belle down somewhat, but $1 million looks doable.

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