Weekend projections: GOAT sneaks a weekend win

Last weekend’s two major new releases are both holding well this time around, but GOAT will move from second to first place on the box office chart with a very good hold. Its 38% decline, coming off a holiday weekend, moves it ahead of “Wuthering Heights”, which itself is down “only” 57%. That would be considered OK for most movies, but it’s excellent for a romance title on the weekend after Valentine’s Day. I Can Only Imagine 2 will land third with a soft $8-million debut.

Here are the official studio projections for the weekend (click the image for a full chart of all films reporting so far).

GOAT will end the weekend with about $58.3 million in the bank domestically, and our model currently predicts it will finish with $92.5 million. Something comfortably over $100 million is still very much on the cards (the model’s high-end prediction stands at $120 million right now). It still remains to open in quite a few international markets, including Australia and China, so its current total of $44 million overseas will probably grow quite a bit from here. This weekend, Sony reports it will earn $17 million in 51 markets, down just 5% from its first weekend. Its standout market this weekend is the UK, where its weekend earnings went up 28% to $3.8 million.

”Wuthering Heights” isn’t keeping up with GOAT, but it is still doing very good business. The model predicts it will end with $95.8 million domestically, but with a fairly wide of uncertainty compared to GOAT. Its $60 million domestic total is paired with $91.7 million internationally, and something around $250 million worldwide by the end of its run looks on the cards. That’s a great result for a movie that cost $80 million to make, and will most likely have a long ancillary life, particularly compared to the Crime 101, which was budgeted at $90 million and will end the weekend with $24.7 million domestically and $46.3 million worldwide. Our model says it will end its run with about $35 million domestically, and perhaps $70 million globally. That’s another poor result for Amazon MGM Studios, which badly needs Project Hail Mary to be a hit at this stage.

How to Make a Killing is landing right in line with our Friday prediction, and A24 is probably fairly happy to see it earn over $2,000 per theater this weekend, in line with Eternity’s opening back in November. After some misfires with 3,000+-theater openings (see The Smashing Machine and Death of a Unicorn), the studio looks as though it might have a more winning strategy with targeted, 1,500-or-so-theater debuts for mass appeal movies.

The standout performer this weekend is EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, which is projected to make exactly $10,000 per theater, with a $3.25-million weekend from 325 theaters. The movie—part documentary, part concert pic—is clearly a hit with Elvis fans, and another event success. NEON has released a few films like this in recent years, and this one should eclipse Amazing Grace’s $4.45 million in earnings to become the distributor’s highest-earning musical documentary/concert film.

– Studio weekend projections

– 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