Weekend projections: Thor tops chart again, Crawdads opens in third place

July 17, 2022

Thor: Love and Thunder

Thor: Love and Thunder will easily stay atop the box office chart this weekend, according to Sunday morning projections from the studios. Its 68% decline in its second weekend is right in line with the 67% drop experienced by Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in its sophomore outing back in mid-May. Of the three new releases hitting the top 10, Where the Crawdads Sing is performing best, with $17 million enough to put it in third place.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look as of Sunday (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…



Thor’s second weekend is no disgrace, but indicates slight weakness for the film. After posting the best opening weekend for the Thor franchise last weekend, it’s having the biggest second-weekend decline. By comparison Thor: Ragnarok fell 53% in its second weekend, Thor: The Dark World declined 57%, and the original Thor dropped 47%. The market has changed since those films came out, of course, but given the lack of competition this weekend, Love and Thunder is looking so-so so far.

In third place this weekend, Where the Crawdads Sing is expected to hit a very respectable $17 million. That’s quite a long way short of our Friday-morning prediction of $24.2 million, which was strongly influenced by its excellent $2.3-million in previews on Thursday, but well ahead of our fundamentals prediction of $9.8 million. In fact, it’s right in line with what our model would have expected for a film like this pre-pandemic. The 2019 incarnation of Little Women opened with $16.8 million, for example, and that was helped by excellent reviews and opening over Christmas weekend.

Likewise, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is posting solid numbers this weekend. It will open with about $1.9 million, per Focus Features’s Sunday morning projection, which is only fractionally behind the $2 million that the model thinks it would likely have made pre-pandemic.

The softest opening this weekend belongs to Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank, which will debut with about $6.25 million. Its relative weakness (the model expected $11 million going into the weekend, and $13 million after the preview numbers came in) is most likely due to competition from Minions: The Rise of Gru and, to a lesser extent, Lightyear.

Putting all of this together, we have a fairly soft weekend at the box office, mostly thanks to a lack of really strong new releases. However, the collective performance of those new releases is quite encouraging, particularly given that the two standout performers are dramas, and our model’s pandemic adjustment will reach a new high of 77% coming out of this weekend. That’s substantially better than the 70% baseline I’ve been using to predict box office through the end of the year. It also bodes well for a good opening for Nope next weekend.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time biggest weekends - All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Thor