Weekend predictions: Super Pets set for weekend win

July 29, 2022

DC League of Super Pets looks set for a fairly straightforward weekend win, even though where exactly it’ll land is hard to say, even with Thursday’s preview numbers available. Earning $2.2 million on Thursday is a healthy performance for an animated film—particularly one not part of an established franchise—but previews aren’t a perfect predictor for animated films in general.

Here’s what our model thought before we had those Thursday numbers…

And here’s what our model makes of those $2.2 million in previews…

In simple terms, the previews look great, and certainly enough to support a weekend of over $40 million, which would be an excellent result for the film. But the range of uncertainty is very high on this one. If it has a multiplier of 12.2, like Boss Baby: Family Business, it’ll end up with a weekend around $27 million. A multiplier like The Addams Family’s 24.24 would convert into an eye-popping $53.3 million weekend.

Our model’s final prediction is a weighted average of the fundamentals and the previews predictions, which comes in at $39.3 million. To be honest, that feels high to me, but something in the range of $35 million is certainly on the cards.

This weekend’s other new wide release is B.J. Novak’s Vengeance, a black comedy that’s opening in just shy of 1,000 theaters.

This is a tough genre for theatrical releases, and the model thinks it’ll probably land somewhere between $1 million and $2 million this weekend. Audience buzz is pretty good though, and films with an adult-skewing demographic have been performing quite well recently. It looks to me as though Vengeance has a shot of making the top 10.

Here’s what our model thinks about that top 10…

Right now, Vengeance looks set for 11th place this weekend, and the weekend as a whole looks as though it’ll be slightly behind last weekend. The fact that the decline is only predicted at 8% is mostly down to that big opening number for Super Pets. My hunch is that we’ll be looking at a weekend over $100 million again (which is good news considering we’re at the tail end of the major Summer openers!), but it might prove to be a close run thing.

Bruce Nash

Filed under: Weekend Preview, DC League of Super Pets, Vengeance, B.J. Novak