Weekend predictions: Black Phone eyeing box office win on incredibly slow weekend

Halloween weekend is generally not a great time to release a movie, with the key movie-going demographics either trick-or-treating or partying. With Halloween falling on Friday this year, and none of the movies currently in theaters performing particularly well, we’re looking at very quiet movie theaters this weekend. Horror movie Black Phone 2 looks like the favorite to win the weekend, with less than $10 million.

There’s only one film that has a standard prediction this weekend. Bugonia is expanding wide, after debuting with a promising $709,848 last weekend from 17 theaters.

Our model for wide expansions has a pretty good track record overall, but there’s a fairly wide range of uncertainty with films like this. There’s an outside chance Bugonia could win the weekend if it substantially over-performs our prediction. Most likely it’ll land somewhere around the middle of the top ten.

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

Another movie with a shot at topping the chart is the re-release of Back to the Future. Our model predicts that will pick up something in vicinity of $7 million, but again with a high degree of uncertainty. Maybe it can inspire some older theatergoers to take their children or grandchildren on Saturday or Sunday?

Ironically, the one thing that might help improve numbers this weekend is bad weather in the Northeast. If folks abandon trick-or-treating plans, we might see better numbers than expected. But that almost certainly won’t be enough to turn this into a weekend that compares favorably with last weekend, or last year.

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