Weekend projections: Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero’s super weekend

August 21, 2022

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero is cruising to a solid win at the box office this weekend, with Crunchyroll projecting it will end the weekend with $20.1 million. That’s a shade lower than our prediction on Friday morning, but not by enough to be of particular concern. Likewise, Beast’s $11.57 million weekend will be close enough to Friday’s prediction to call it a win.

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

Technically, Dragon Ball’s debut lies 7th in the list of most front-loaded opening weekends of all time, with its Friday gross (really consisting of Thursday evening and Friday) of $10.89 million making up more than half of its projected weekend total. Japanese films tend to be very front loaded, but this is the most extreme case in our record books, beating Jujutsu Kaisen’s 48% Friday share ($8.7 million out of $18 million) when it opened in March this year.

In the usual course of events, this frontloading would be cause for concern, but it’s not much of a surprise in this case, and I don’t think it’s of much concern for Crunchyroll. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero will end Sunday with almost exactly the same total as Dragon Ball Super: Broly had by the end of its opening weekend. The difference between the two is that Broly opened on a Wednesday, and so had five days to make that much. Does that matter in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. Clearly, anime is a well-established player in the North America theatrical market, and one that can snipe a weekend win when there’s a lull in studio releases. Whether a film picks up $20 million between Wednesday and Sunday or Thursday evening and Sunday doesn’t change the equation.

The performance of Beast looks fairly modest in comparison, but Universal will be fairly happy with topping $10 million domestically, and with hitting about the same internationally (it stands at $10.3 million outside North America so far). Its opening marginally beats that for The Mountain Between Us, which had the advantage of coming out prior to the pandemic, having another major star alongside Idris Elba (namely, Kate Winslet), and was probably marginally boosted by having a PG-13 rating, compared to Beast’s R. That points to Idris Elba’s star being in the ascendent, perhaps eclipsing Liam Neeson, who is Elba’s senior be a little over 20 years—Neeson turned 70 in June, Elba will turn 50 in September. With no disrespect intended towards Mr. Neeson, pulling off the lead role in an action thriller is a little more believable if you’re not a pensioner.

Pretty much every other movie in the top 10 ended up around where the model predicted. In fact only Top Gun: Maverick will fall more than 10% away from what our model predicted, and (if you haven’t noticed already) it’s something of a special case. In fact, it’s so far outside the normal range for a movie in its 13th week in theaters that it’s warping our model as it goes. That’s something I’ll be looking at, and probably making an adjustment for in the next few weeks.

The big news for Maverick this weekend is that it’s now the 6th-highest-grossing film of all time at the domestic box office, after it overtook Avengers: Infinity War on Friday.

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

Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com

Filed under: Liam Neeson, Kate Winslet, Idris Elba