Weekend predictions: Violent Night shooting for second place on slow weekend

December 2, 2022

Violent Night

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shouldn’t have much trouble staying top at the box office this weekend, with a hodgepodge of new releases aiming to pick up the slack coming off Thanksgiving, but none of them looking likely to do huge business. The film with the best shot at coming second is Violent Night, while Top Gun: Maverick and I Heard the Bells could shake up the top 10.

Here’s what the model thinks of Violent Night’s prospects:

The David Harbour-led action comedy has a decent shot at hitting $10 million this weekend, and seems just about a lock for second place. We haven’t seen word of preview numbers for the film, which might be a warning sign. Or just a product of the unusual time of year.

The film our model thinks is most likely to threaten Violent Night is actually the re-release of Top Gun: Maverick. Re-releases are generally regarded as very hard to predict, but our model has had remarkable success this year, predicting a $4.7-million weekend for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which did $5.4 million; and $10.1 million for the re-release of Avatar which did $10.5 million. I feel like its luck will run out at some point, and this may well be that weekend, but it’s predicting $6.1 million for Maverick, which should be enough for third place.

One other film that’s very hard to predict this weekend is I Heard the Bells, which posted a very healthy $767,012 on Thursday. Since Thursday releases are so rare, that doesn’t give us a huge amount of information about its weekend prospects, but the model thinks doubling that number is about right, which would give it another $1.5 million from Friday to Sunday.

Here’s what our model thinks the top 10 as a whole will look like…

All-in-all we’re looking at a very slow weekend, with Wakanda Forever potentially earning almost half of all box office dollars, even though it’s playing in its fourth weekend. If it can do more than $26 million this weekend, it’ll pass $400 million at the domestic box office. I think it should hit that number, but our model’s $33 million is a little generous. Either way, this will be a good time to go to a theater if you like having a good seat and not too many people crammed around you.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Top Gun: Maverick, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Violent Night, I Heard the Bells, David Harbour