Weekend projections: Captain America beats Last Breath on slow Oscar weekend

Captain America: Brave New World will cruise to another comfortable win at the box office this weekend, with Last Breath landing with a not-awful/not-great $7.8 million opening in second place, and this weekend’s three other new wide releases failing to make much of an impression in theaters.

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

After some ups and downs over the last few weeks thanks to a plethora of unusual days for the market—MLK weekend, Presidents’ Day, the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day—this is a much more typical weekend, and every film in the top 10 is falling within 20% of our model’s prediction. Captain America is matching it exactly, and will end the weekend with about $163.7 million domestically, per Disney. Our model now thinks it will finish its run in North America with $204 million. Disney reports it now has $178.1 million internationally, which is about 10% more than its domestic total. If that holds when it finishes its run, it will hit $425 million globally—a far cry from previus MCU installments, but still an enviable amount of money.

Last Breath, meanwhile, is posting decent numbers for Focus Features. Our model puts the studio’s track record for films like this at around $7 million, and it’s coming in somewhat ahead of that figure. Its relative lack of competition might have helped it.

Overall, this is very slow weekend in theaters. The slowest of the year so far, in fact. That’s almost certainly not because studios fear competition with the Oscars. The audience for the show is far down from its heyday. Some of the films hoping for big wins are still playing in theaters though, and they are getting good boosts in earnings. There order by percentage increase from last weekend might offer some clues as to what films people expect to win big prizes: Anora is up 135%, A Real Pain 116%, Conclave 96%, The Brutalist 24%, I’m Still Here 17%, and A Complete Unknown 12%.

– 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