Weekend estimates: The Batman storms to $128.5-million projected domestic opening

March 6, 2022

The Batman

The Batman will earn about $130 million at the domestic box office this weekend, according to Warner Bros.’s Sunday morning projection. That would be a great result for a franchise reboot at any time, and it’s downright spectacular by current standards. It’s only the second film to open with more than $100 million since the beginning of 2020 (Spider-Man: No Way Home being the first, of course), and it’s performance narrowly exceeds the $123 million our model would have predicted for the film pre-pandemic. Is the pandemic’s effect on theatergoing beginning to wane?

Here’s how the domestic numbers look this morning…




The Batman looks as though it will fall a little short of our model’s Friday-morning prediction, although the more detailed numbers I’ve seen suggest that Warner Bros. is being slightly cautious on its projection this morning, and there’s a good chance the film will top $130 million once all the numbers are in on Monday. What’s a few million between friends though? The big story here is that The Batman joins Spider-Man: No Way Home and Uncharted as films that outperformed what we’d have expected on opening weekend before the pandemic. If we exclude “date night” films like Marry Me and Death on the Nile, audiences in 2022 actually look very similar to audiences back in 2019.

I think it’s too soon to conclude that the pandemic is “over,” so far as the theatrical market is concerned, but it’s clear that some films are breaking through to wider audiences. Our pandemic adjustment, which estimates the share of the audience that has returned to theatergoing now stands at 65%, but that blends the performance of all movies. For tentpole movies like The Batman, the figure now stands at 84%, and it might get back to 100% if a couple more films perform this way. In other words, we are very close to seeing “normal” audiences for the biggest studio films. The next film that will test that theory is arguably Morbius, which arrives in theaters on April 1, although The Lost City will also provide some clues when it comes out on March 25.

Overall, the market will fall a little short of our model’s Friday-morning prediction, but will still break the key $150-million barrier, only the second time that’s happened since the beginning of 2020. Clearly the competition with Batman pulled down some other films, but we’re still seeing respectable holds across the board. Uncharted will top $100 million today, technically becoming the second film to do that in 2022, because Batman is estimated to have narrowly cleared that threshold on Saturday.

- Weekend studio estimates
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, The Batman, Death on the Nile, Uncharted, Marry Me, Spider-Man: No Way Home