Weekend projections: Black Panther untroubled at the top as Strange World falters

November 27, 2022

Thanksgiving is hardly delivering a feast at the box office this year, with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever topping the chart for the third weekend running, and no new film breaking the $20-million barrier, even over the five-day Holiday weekend. Strange World is a particular disappointment, as it’ll post the second-worst opening for a wide release for Walt Disney Animation Studios, not far ahead of Raya and the Last Dragon’s pandemic-affected $8.5 million. It’ll still finish the weekend in second place though, which shows how little competition there is at the moment.

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

Black Panther’s 31% decline in its third weekend is fairly standard under normal circumstances, but quite disappointing for Thanksgiving weekend. By way of comparison, Ford v. Ferrari dropped 16% in its third weekend over Thanksgiving, 2019, and Dr. Suess’ The Grinch was down 21% in its third weekend over Thanksgiving, 2018.

Wakanda Forever will end the weekend with around $367.7 million domestically, and another $307.9 million in international markets. Its $675.6-million global total to date puts it 7th in the world for the year with more to come.

Strange World is a straight-up bust for Disney. It will pick up another $9 million internationally this weekend, which obviously won’t save it, and Disney isn’t even releasing it in theaters in Russia, China, France, Middle East, Malaysia, Indonesia and a number of medium/smaller international markets. It might have a second life on the home market, but it never got enough attention from the studio to break out. A measure of how badly it’s doing: Treasure Planet, widely considered Disney’s biggest animated bust, opened with $12 million over Thanksgiving in 2002—a number Strange World doesn’t doesn’t look as though it’ll beat even with 20 years of inflation to help it.

One film getting lots of attention is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Our projected figure for the weekend comes from Deadline, which cites “industry sources.” It’s probably worth taking that figure with a grain of salt, but anything in that region is good news for Netflix and for the exhibitors. Playing in 696 theaters, the film will average $13,200 in each of them—the best for a movie in the top 10—and this is a result that seems to show the path forward for streamers. A brief exclusive theatrical window defrays some of the production and marketing costs for Netflix, and gives the film the cachet of having played in theaters, which has value when it goes on to the platform. The combination of a Thanksgiving theatrical release and Christmas streaming release makes a huge amount of sense (and, in fact, is the approach Disney may take with Strange World, given its soft opening). It’s hard to imagine Netflix won’t try a similar approach with a few of its bigger movies next year, and theaters will hopefully welcome them.

The rest of the top 10 is disappointing, including The Fabelmans, which is headed for a $2.2-million weekend from 638 movie houses—basically the same footprint as Glass Onion for less than a quarter of the result. Bones and All is also having a rocky transition from limited release and will likely come in just behind The Fabelmans in spite of playing in four times as many theaters. The market continues to look tough for dramatic movies.

More generally, this is a disappointing weekend for the industry. Aside from Glass Onion pointing towards a peaceful end to the theatrical vs. streaming war, the news isn’t good. The lack of big movies is really taking a toll on the theatrical market, with this Thanksgiving looking like it will deliver fewer box office dollars than Thanksgiving last year, in spite of a market recovery of around 50% for 2022 vs. 2021 as a whole. Avatar: The Way of Water will have a lot of work to do when it arrives in theaters in just under three weeks from now, and things could look fairly dire between now and then.

- 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