Weekend predictions: ’tis the weekend before Avatar, and nothing is stirring

December 9, 2022

Violent Night

With holiday shopping in full swing, and Avatar: The Way of Water arriving next week, movie theaters will be very quiet this weekend. Unless something unexpected happens, this will be the second-slowest weekend of the year, behind the weekend of January 28, when Spider-Man: No Way Home recorded its sixth weekend win with a modest $11 million. Black Panther: Wakana Forever is predicted to top the chart for a fifth time this weekend, with our model thinking it’ll earn about $13.5 million. If it can’t top $10 million (which is a possibility), this might prove to be the slowest weekend of the year.

Before we look at the weekend as a whole, there is one film expanding wide this weekend. The romantic drama Spoiler Alert started out in six theaters last weekend and expands to 782 this time around. This is an expansion route that quite a few films have taken recently—it’s the sixth since the beginning of October, in fact—as the chart below shows.

Although a few films taking this expansion strategy have managed to top $2 million in their first wide weekend, their theater averages have all dropped dramatically. The median performance is for the theater average to drop from $39,851 on opening weekend to $2,136 when a movie expands like this, for a 94.64% decline. If Spoiler Alert does the same, it’ll earn around $580,000 this weekend.

This analysis of wide expansions is a new addition to our model, so it comes with all the usual disclaimers. I’m feeling fairly comfortable with it based on a comparison of this film with the others on the list. Caveat emptor, as they say.

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

With no new competition, the model thinks Black Panther will hold on quite strongly this weekend, and that quite a few films will fall less than 25%. I think that might be optimistic, but we shouldn’t see a huge drop in total from last weekend. The problem, of course, is that last weekend wasn’t that great to begin with. Maybe Violent Night can hold on well enough to give us a “win”, if we define winning to be “not having the worst weekend of the year.”

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Spoiler Alert, Spider-Man: No Way Home