Weekend predictions: Fantastic Four set for super-sized weekend after $24.4 million in previews

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is headed for a gigantic opening weekend, after earning $24.4 million from preview screenings on Thursday evening. That compares to Superman’s $19.7 million on Thursday (plus $2.8 million from earlier advance screenings) on its way to a $125-million debut. There are still a lot of unknowns as of Friday morning, but an opening larger than Superman’s looks a good bet. Here’s what our model has to say…

First, here’s the model’s “baseline” prediction for Fantastic Four, which was constructed before we had hard data on ticket sales…

Needless to say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has run into some speed bumps in recent years, with declining box office numbers across the board. Movies featuring new characters and story arcs have actually had remarkably stable opening weekends over the past five years, with all four earning between $71.3 million and $80.4 million.

What has set Fantastic Four apart leading up to its release is higher audience interest. That has boosted our model’s predictions consistently into a higher bracket as we’ve been tracking the run-up to its release. That’s encouraging, but doesn’t always portend great results at the box office—the fact that people are watching the trailer and looking up the film here on The Numbers doesn’t guarantee that they’ll go ahead and buy a ticket.

The Thursday preview numbers confirm that interest is translating into ticket sales in a big way though…

The obvious comparison point here is Superman, which had a multiplier between previews and final opening weekend of 5.56 (ignoring the complicating factor that some of Superman’s previews came before Thursday). A similar multiplier would give Fantastic Four an opening weekend of around $135 million. The low-end possibility is that it performs more like Thor: Love and Thunder, which would bag it a $121-million debut.

The model, however, compares new films against the last ten releases with a similar preview number and MPA rating to construct an average, and that points to an opening as high as $170 million. Once the fundamentals are added back into the model, it ends up with a predicted $157.5-million opening.

The consensus is that Fantastic Four won’t top $150 million (in fact, $125 million is deemed more likely), but a real breakout is a possibility, particularly given the great reviews and the fact that it’s the first Marvel movie in a long time that doesn’t look like a cooker-cutter clone of previous Marvel movies. Can that bring in a new audience? We’ll know the answer to that question in the next couple of days.

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

Even if Fantastic Four falls short of the model’s prediction, we’re looking at a great weekend in movie theaters. Superman continues to generate good results, and Jurassic World Rebirth will top $10 million again this weekend.

The model’s prediction for I Know What You Did Last Summer is relatively high, with a predicted second-weekend drop of just 43%. That’s because it’s been showing good numbers on weekdays. I suspect this is more to do with its target audience being on Summer vacation than fantastic word of mouth, and it will most likely fall quite a way short of what’s predicted above.

The same might be true of Smurfs, although to a lesser extent, given that it’s targeted at a very young audience.

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