Weekend projections: Black Panther edges out Violent Night in surprisingly close race

December 4, 2022

Violent Night

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will win the weekend, as expected, but it will only do so by a narrow margin thanks to a steep post-Thanksgiving decline to $17.6 million coupled with a strong debut for Violent Night. The horror comedy rides into town with a projected $13.3 million, according to Universal, which comfortably beats our Friday-morning prediction.

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 slump isn’t entirely unexpected, since it was clearly the biggest draw for older family audiences over the Thanksgiving holiday, and took a corresponding hit this time around. But falling 61% in its fourth weekend is still a sign that it’s running out of gas. With $394 million or so domestically coming out of the weekend, it’ll still easily top $400 million, but we’re looking at it earning something closer to $425 million in total in North America, rather than the $450 million that had looked on the cards. With $339.3 million so far internationally, the film stands at $733 million in total worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie of 2022.

Violent Night is outpacing expectations this weekend fairly comfortably. Our model expected it would earn something in the region of $10 million, and Universal has its opening pegged at about $13.3 million as of this morning. That’s a welcome result given the small number of major films coming out during December, and a 88% Rotten Tomatoes audience score and B+ CinemaScore mean it could have good legs through the Holidays. With a reported budget around $20 million, the film looks like it’ll make a nice profit. The studio will hope it can become a holiday home market staple too. We’ll have to wait 12 months to find that out though.

Elsewhere in the top 10, Fathom Events is continuing its strong run of faith-based releases with I Heard the Bells, which should top $1.8 million this weekend from just 474 locations. That follows a blockbuster run (relatively speaking) for The Chosen Season 3, which will end this weekend with around $14.4 million.

Serious dramas and awards hopefuls continue to struggle at the box office, although The Fabelmans and Bones and All did at least have good holds this weekend. There’s no hiding the fact that the audience for these films just isn’t showing up right now. What that means for the marketing strategy for awards, not to mention the awards shows themselves, remains to be seen, but unless voters in the various academies and guilds bestow surprising favor on the likes of Top Gun: Maverick, Black Panther, and Avatar: The Way of Water, awards shows will be all about films that hardly anyone has seen.

Speaking of Top Gun: Maverick, it will pick up another $700,000 this weekend in its pre-Christmas re-release. That’s much lower than our model predicted. As I mentioned on Friday, the model was probably getting over-confident on these hard-to-predict rereleases. The good news is that we have more data for the model to digest. The bad news is that its predictions will likely come down quite a bit as a result.

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

Bruce Nash,