Weekend predictions: Death on the Nile headed to welcome weekend win

February 11, 2022

Death on the Nile

In this week’s update to our annual market prediction, I mentioned how important the performance of Death on the Nile will be to gauging the key “older” demographic (in industry terms, “anyone over 25”). So its $1.1 million in previews (which includes some early access screenings on Wednesday, as well as regular Thursday previews) is a welcome sign, and points to a weekend win. Marry Me is also showing good numbers from previews this morning.

Here’s what our model thinks of Death on the Nile’s performance for the weekend, first based on its murder-mystery pedigree, and second on its Thursday preview numbers…







Traditional murder mysteries had virtually disappeared from theaters until Murder on the Orient Express and Knives Out revived the genre. That made things hard for our model to begin with, and the fact that this is a movie that falls into our “date night” category makes things even harder. Those films have been faring particularly poorly during the pandemic, and studios have been increasingly wary of releasing them. The estimate that 40% of date night moviegoers are currently going to theaters is a therefore a bit of a shot in the dark. If I had treated Death on the Nile as a “regular” movie (for which the model estimates 56% audience attendance), the predicted weekend would have been $15 million. That looks closer to the mark now we have the preview numbers in, which our model projects should translate into a weekend just shy of $20 million.

Our final Friday-morning prediction is a weighted average of the two predictions, and comes out at $17.5 million. Unless jackass forever significantly outperforms expectations that should be enough to win the weekend.

Meanwhile, Marry Me is showing a similar pattern of previews coming in a little ahead of expectations…







Romantic comedies aren’t quite as rare as murder mysteries, but they have also looked like a dying breed recently, at least in theaters. $525,000 in previews is a solid number, given the circumstances, and points towards a weekend somewhere in the $7 million to $9 million range. That wouldn’t be a terrible number pre-pandemic, and is a very solid start these days. Valentine’s Day on Monday is perhaps helping the film out the gate, and it’s obviously solid counterprogramming against the Super Bowl. Its simultaneous debut on Peacock doesn’t seem to be doing any harm either.

This weekend’s other new wide release comes from one of the most specific genres in showbiz, the “Liam Neeson action movie.”





Liam Neeson’s track record in action movies really speaks for itself. After adjusting for the effect of the pandemic, he hasn’t starred in an action film that has opened with less than $9.25 million in over 30 years. (His last “miss” was Darkman, which debuted with $8.1 million back in August, 1990!) Blacklight might break that streak though, as it faces two challenges. First, it’s opening on Super Bowl weekend, which will likely reduce the size of its core audience on Sunday. Second, it’s the first major release from Briarcliffe Entertainment. New distributors often struggle to find audiences with their first few releases as they iron out their marketing and theater booking processes. That’s hard to model, but I would expect Blacklight to come in somewhere under $5 million.

Making an adjustment on something we can’t model would defeat the purpose of publishing our predictions though, so I’m sticking with how the model sees this one: a Liam Neeson action movie opening in 2,772 theaters should be doing about $7 million on opening weekend these days.





The three new wide releases will help support the market as a whole this weekend. As I mentioned above, Blacklight is likely to fall short of our model’s predicted $6.99 million, but we’ll still probably see a welcome “up” weekend overall.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Death on the Nile, Marry Me, Liam Neeson