Weekend predictions: Guardians of the Galaxy headed for $110-million weekend

May 5, 2023

Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3

Everything we know so far about the performance of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 points towards an opening weekend close to $110 million. That’ll knock The Super Mario Bros. Movie off top spot, but the video game adaptation won’t have any trouble holding on to second spot as Love Again looks likely to struggle.

Here’s what our model thought of Guardians going into the weekend:

Given the track record of the franchise, our model has had the film hovering around a $100-million to $120-million opening ever since we first ran the numbers on the film back in October. The current estimated market strength pulls it down quite a bit (and unrealistically so, in my opinion—the model is probably overreacting to a few smaller films struggling to find an audience recently), but the audience interest bumps the prediction right back up to $111 million.

The $17.5 million the film earned in previews on Thursday doesn’t move the prediction by much…

When announcing numbers this morning, Disney pointed to the $17 million earned from previews by Guardians Vol. 2 back in 2017. The implication is that something in the $145-million to $150-million range is on the cards. To be fair, that is on the cards. But Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania turned exactly the same amount—$17.5 million—into a $106-million opening just a few months ago. The model thinks Guardians 3 will do slightly better, but that just takes us back to a predicted $110-million debut.

Could the film surprise with something better? For sure. But that would take an influx of new fans for what is a very well established franchise at this point. Given the relative struggles of the Marvel franchise recently, Disney will probably be happy with $110 million this weekend.

Firmly in the counter-programming column, the romantic comedy Love Again will be hitting theaters this weekend…

We still have a special adjustment for romantic movies, which the model thinks are doing 20% worse on average than other movies. That reduces the prediction for Love Again quite a bit. There does seem to be some audience interest in this one, but ultimately the model looked at this as a $5-million to $10-million movie on opening weekend.

The previews suggest it was being optimistic…

Romantic comedies have quite high Thursday preview-to-weekend multipliers, but earning $240,000 on Thursday means the film will have to take off in a big way to get anywhere near the original predicted $6.9 million. In fact, the close-to-$4-million prediction produced by taking a weighted average of the model’s two predictions might be overly optimistic. I think getting to $3 million would be a victory, given how the movie has started out.

Here’s what that model thinks the top 10 will look like.

Behind Guardians and Mario, there’s a long list of films that will be playing to fairly empty theaters this weekend. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is the film I think is most likely to surprise on the upside. Its reviews and audience response have both been terrific, and it is targeted towards an under-served demographic. It’s not doing enough to hold on to theaters for long, but it might do relatively well compared to its slightly disappointing debut.

In all, we should see a weekend well over $150 million for all films in release, and a solid start to the Summer box office season. - Want to keep The Numbers ad free? Please help with a monthly donation.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, Love Again, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret