Weekend predictions: Insidious headed towards surprise weekend win

July 7, 2023

Insidious: The Red Door looks likely to pull off a surprise win at the box office this weekend, pushing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny into second place in its second weekend in theaters. With Sound of Freedom and Joy Ride also set for places in the top four, this will be a weekend where new releases at least partly make up for the poor performance of some recent box office misses.

Here’s how our model looked at The Red Door coming into the weekend:

The Insidious franchise is well established at this point, with this being the fifth outing. The best performance on opening weekend before now was $40.3 million by Insidious: Chapter 2, and an opening around $25 million looked like a good bet going into this weekend.

Our audience tracking suggested it could go a bit higher, and that more than proved to be the case on Thursday:

If we go purely by the historical performance of preview figures for horror movies, we could be looking at a $40-million opening for Red Door. The model predicts something a little short of that, and preview numbers have been quite inflated recently, so I wouldn’t be surprised at a weekend in the low $30-millions. That would still almost certainly be enough for it to top the chart. A franchise-best opening isn’t entirely out of the question, but I think second-place to Insidious: Chapter 2 is a safer bet, and still an excellent performance.

Joy Ride, meanwhile, had less lofty ambitions going into the weekend:

It too is looking like it’ll do quite a bit better than expected:

The caveat in this case is that preview numbers for comedies vary widely. If Joy Ride performs like No Hard Feelings, it’ll end the weekend with around $7.7 million. My money would be on it getting a little closer to $10 million than that, but not getting much more than $10 million if it hits that figure at all.

The real mystery going into the weekend is how well Sound of Freedom will perform. It opened in top spot on July 4, and has since finished in second place on the daily chart, behind Dial of Destiny on Wednesday and Thursday. There aren’t many films that open on a Holiday Tuesday, so modeling how well it’ll do this weekend is a challenge. The best way I could think to do it was to look at the Thursday performance of films that opened on Tuesday or Wednesday…

A weekend somewhere around $15 million feels about right based on how Sound of Freedom has done so far, but there’s a lot of uncertainty around this one. I think it’s unlikely to win the weekend, but it has a good chance of finishing ahead of Joy Ride in third place.

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

Our run of weekends with $50-million earners will come to an end this time around, but we still have a good chance of seeing the total box office increase from last weekend thanks to three strong openings from the new films. The timing of the release of each of them looks pretty good, with the films released in the run up to July 4 fading fast at the box office.

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Bruce Nash

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Sound of Freedom, Insidious: The Red Door, No Hard Feelings, Joy Ride, Insidious