Weekend box office: Deadpool does it again

Deadpool & Wolverine returned to the top of the box office chart at the weekend, as four new wide releases failed to make much of an impression on what’s “officially” the last weekend of Summer. Labor Day means we’ll have estimates for most movies until Tuesday, and this is a snapshot of where everything stood as of noon on Monday.

These are the studio estimates, as reported on Sunday, and in some cases updated on Monday (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

Due to the long weekend and travel commitments, we didn’t publish weekend predictions on Friday, but the full model was run (with some minor tidy-up today), so we can compare how each film did compared to expectations.

Generally, films are hitting our model’s predictions this weekend. Deadpool & Wolverine is best example of that, in fact, in that it is almost exactly hitting what our model predicted. When it comes to hitting or missing our prediction, there’s not much pattern to be seen when it comes to genre or style of film, although Twisters got a notable bump this weekend as moviegoers caught up on, or relived, this Summer’s thrill ride.

Among the new releases, Reagan is performing the strongest, and its opening, at $7.4 million, is respectable for a biopic. It could well benefit from the long weekend too.

Afraid, meanwhile, is a dud, probably the victim of being a little hard to distinguish (at least on the surface) from various other techno-horror films that have come our way in the last year or two. It will rapidly fade, as will 1992 (which opened with $1.365 million) and Slingshot (which mustered around $485,000).

Overall, this is a fairly typical Labor Day weekend, in that we are having a slow weekend in theaters. It’s fair to say that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will completely dominate the chart next weekend, giving the market a much-needed boost. We plan to have predictions for that on Friday morning.

– All-time top-grossing movies in North America

– All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com