Weekend predictions: Minecraft heading to monster opening

A Minecraft Movie will post the best weekend of 2025, easily topping Captain America: Brave New World’s $88.8 million, and looking very likely to exceed $100 million.

Minecraft’s numbers have been steadily rising over the past few weeks as audience interest grows. Our baseline model, which only takes into “public” factors, has increased from around a $60-million opening to $75 million going into the weekend.

Note that our baseline doesn’t take into account actual sales information. Talking to theaters owners at CinemaCon we heard across-the-board confirmation that pre-sales for the movie were huge, and expectations for the weekend increased on a daily basis. By Thursday morning, something around $100 milion was the consensus, with a few brave (or particularly well-informed) souls predicting as much as $120 million.

This morning’s preview figure, $10.55 million, confirms the rumors…

In cases like this, the model “follows the momentum,” and its prediction, at $114 million, would correspond to a multiplier of 10.8 from Thursday previews to the final weekend number. That’s up with the multipliers of Inside Out 2 and Moana 2. So it wouldn’t be unprecedented, but it would be on the high side.

For now, there’s a fairly high degree of uncertainty on where the film might land, but it seems very likely to top $100 million, and could go quite a bit higher. The $146 million earned by The Super Mario Bros. Movie back in 2023 is surely out of reach, but this is feeling like another absolute blockbuster of a weekend for a long-awaited video-game adaptation.

There is one other movie to consider this weekend. Horror movie Hell of a Summer had decent previews…

Uncertainty is pretty high on this one, but a place in the top 10 seems likely.

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

Given how weak the market has been recently, the story of this weekend is almost all about Minecraft. If it can top $110 million, we should have the biggest weekend for the market as a whole. That figure currently stands at the $153 million earned over the weekend of February 14.

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